So it turns out that you can make buttons out of shrinky-dink plastic! You know, that plastic from your childhood that you could draw on and then put into the oven to make useless shapes out of?

This tutorial from Scissors.Paper.Wok inspired me to give this a shot because I  need buttons for two knitted baby bibs currently in the works. One is for a boy and the other a girl and from previous button shopping I remember not being terribly excited about options to match my knitted bibs.

Because I didn’t have a large round paper punch as used in the tutorial, I started with 2 inch squares and then used a corner round punch to remove the sharp edges.  I used a paper pattern to get the holes in the right spots and punched them with a normal paper punch.

I drew designs on the four buttons, some inspired from the button tutorial and other from icons I pulled up on Google.

Before shrinking:

After baking between parchment paper on 300 degrees for a few minutes:

I must say that they turned out better than I could have hoped. Now the hard part is choosing which button goes one which bib! I think the girl should get the rocket ship of course.