(Ooops, sorry for the absence – I was busy then ill because I’d been busy and also ill because I ate some tasted-fine-but-actually-bad out of date sausages. Yes.)

Right then, Nicole has been in touch asking about “pinback buttons”:

I have thousands of pinback buttons from a failed work campaign. Would love to make them over into something pretty and/or useful. Any suggestions?

I think “pinback buttons” are what we in Britain usually just call “badges” – which we have covered before. There are some great reuses on there (I love fabric covered badges) but I’m not sure if that’s an appropriate suggestion for Nicole – unless she wants to make thousands of them. The decorative pinboard pins idea might be better – since you’d use a good number on a pinboard at a time – unless the campaign failed so badly that you don’t want to be reminded of it ;)

Any more ideas for using up a lot of pinback buttons/badges?

(Photo by Ellen Munro)

We had a question on the ‘Suggest an Item’ page a while ago which I seem to have missed, so here it is. Sylvia asked:

How can I recycle old badges? plastic and metal.

Actually recycling them may be difficult as they tend to be mixed materials – metal and potentially multiple types of plastic but they’re perfect for passing on to someone else. A lot of people collect badges – doesn’t matter what’s on them or actually, the more obscure the better – so either offer them to a local charity/op shop or if you’ve got enough of them to make it worthwhile, offer them on your local Freecycle/Freegle or even eBay/Etsy/Folksy.

A question for badge makers – can old badges be recovered using badge making machine?

Any other ideas?

(Photo by Miss Frannington)