Fun Decorations For Your Office: Homemade Button Push Pins

Button push pins work great to put on bulletins boards and post reminders, calendars or invites.  Throw out the store-bought ones and opt for making your own to accessorize your bulletin board!

Items Needed:

Glue gun

Buttons

Thumb Tacks (flat head)

Steps:

The first thing to do is to make sure you have the correct thumb tacks.  They must be flat on the top.  The ones you buy in most of office supply stores are slightly rounded on top.  When you are looking at them, the way that you can tell if they are flat is that they are made of two pieces.  The best ones will be a regular rounded thumb tack covered with colored plastic. 

You can buy them from Amazon.com – a good tack to use is Charles Leonard Thumb Tacks.

Once you have all the supplies you can get started.  Put a piece of cardboard or paper over the surface you will be working on.  Glue tends to get messy.  While you are waiting for the glue gun to get warm you can sort through the buttons. 

You can use one, two or three buttons on each thumb tack.  Find the colors that you like and stack them on top of each other to see how they look.  If you want to go more conservative you can stick with black and white or browns.

If you don’t have a lot of extra buttons at home, you can also buy them.  They have packages at Wal-Mart in the craft section that are nice bright colors, but they are small and not very sturdy.  You can also buy bags of buttons at craft stores like Joann’s and Michael’s.  The most interesting buttons to use are old buttons that are decorative, and buttons in pretty colors.

Once the glue gun is warm, put a dab of glue on the back of a button and glue it to the top of the thumb tack.  Be careful when you put the glue on the button because sometimes if you put too much, it will go through the thread holes and burn your fingers on the other side. 

After you have glued the bottom button to the thumb tack, place a dab of hot glue on the top of that button and carefully place the next button on top.  As soon as the glue has cooled you have a new button push pin to use wherever you want.

This method also works with magnets.  You can purchase small round, flat magnets at a craft store, then glue buttons on them and have pretty, decorative magnets for your refrigerator or file cabinet.

Try making magnets or push pins in your company’s logo colors and give them away to co-workers.  Or you can make them with holiday colors: red and green for Christmas, or orange and black for Halloween or for a seasonal look.