We picked a snapshot of two custom orders this week. Some lovely one-inch button badges with beautiful fine details for Flower Moon Studio. The other batch was commissioned by the folks running  the Mad Hatters Music Festival in Caunay, France. They were simply lovely and we had a great time working on them. 

We’ve been super busy over the last week or so. I managed to grab some quick snaps of badges we made recently for Sage Ireland LINK and Sine FM’s The First 45 LINK.

Sage are an international company that specialise in Accounting and Payroll software for businesses. They were celebrating the second birthday anniversary of SageOne in the Irish market.

The folks from Sine FM’s The First 45 got badges off of us too. Their radio show is on every Friday evening and specialises alternative and unsigned artists. Surprisingly, An Post’s estimation calculator was right and he got them within 3 working days.

We’ve worked with the North Dublin Wildcats LINK before and we were delighted when they contacted us looking for more badges. They qualified for the International Cheer Union Championship in the US and are heading off in a couple of weeks. Apart from the ICU, they’re also heading off to Florida for the USASF Dance competition too. They’ll also be on the telly on TV3′s Morning Show later today.

Best of luck to the team and Coach Hayden in the competition.

Hope you and yours had a great Xmas and New Year. I spent the holidays with the family with almost dial-up internet speed. It’s great to be back in the workshop with DSL internet. Just before Christmas the Galway Arts Centre got in touch for some custom button badges. My fave one is the bunny.

The last week or so has been jammers in the HQ. I’ve made lots of cheerleading badges for different groups, you can take a peek over on the Facebook page LINK.

The Dublin Web Summit LINK kicks off today and tomorrow but last week I was contacted by Flight 1337, an Engagement Agency in Amsterdam regarding custom badges. They were one of the companies lucky enough to be selected for the Dublin Web Summit Start-Up Competition this year. They’ll also be debuting the rebranded Flight 1337 as Subatomic Inc., which is aiming to be a full engagement agency including consultancy and design.

They also gave me these epic caramel waffles from Amsterdam. Nom nom nom.

Here at the Spike Badges HQ, we were recently contacted by Depaul Ireland to make a large quantity of custom badges ahead of Electric Picnic. The badges were made to the backdrop of a Vampire Diaries marathon.

This will be Depaul Ireland’s fifth year at Electric Picnic. Over the last four years, professional artists have worked alongside people experiencing homelessness to create the ‘Life’s No Picnic On The Streets‘ exhibition at Mindfield in Electric Picnic.

One installation which has caught my eye is the ‘Dear Me’ exhibit. Under a sycamore tree, users of Depaul’s services has letters written by them ten years ago and ten years into the future. These letters are crafted into fabric flowers and planted at its base Festival goers can write their own ‘Dear Me’ letters.

Other installations include ’13.raw’ photographic exhibition; ‘No coins, just change’ and ‘Message in a Mixtape’ with old-style cassettes hidden throughout Electric Picnic for attendees to find.

So if you’re at Electric Picnic next week, call down to the exhibition in the Mindfield area.

We thought you’d like to know how we make our badges here at the Spike Badges HQ. We recently made a custom badge order for pop-up eatery Canteen Limerick and snapped a few pics.

Firstly, when we’re working with someone on a custom badge order, if there’s a possibility that the design could be improved, we’ll give you feedback. In some cases, we’ll take images of prototype badges and send them onto you to sign-off on. Last thing we want to do is give you badges that you’re not happy with.

Normally for custom badge orders, we print 5-10% extra designs between faulty prints and misaligned badges. After sorting out the designs, we got all these lovely badge templates printed up. With a craft knife, the rows are sliced into strips to allow faster cutting with the hand-puncher.

<image - canteen gallies>

Next, the plastic mylar is placed over the punched badge template. The designs are inspected to make sure there’s no imperfections on the paper or trapped fibres or dust motes between the plastic mylar and paper. Badges with white backgrounds take far longer to arrange as every speck shows up.

<image - canteen cutouts and mylar>

Chugging along onto the actual machine work now. The metal button is placed in the machine with paper and mylar is place over it. After positioning them correctly, the table is swished and once the handle is pulled, the parts are compressed together.

<image - canteen cutout in machine>

Next up is placing the pin into the machine. We ensure the pin is placed into the machine at a straight angle which ensures the pin at the back will be straight. A possible fault is if the design and mylar aren’t placed correctly, when turned and it’ll become off-centre when the table is swished. This means the design and pin aren’t lined up and it’ll all be at different angles which is a major fault in our standards.

<image - canteen finished badge>

After we’ve pressed a whole pile of badges, the head minion hand-examines each badge for quality assurance. Passed badges go into holding bags and faulty ones get trashed. After a number of badges have been produced, the badges are taken out of the bags, go through final quality assurance checks again before being counted and dispatched.

And there you have it. That’s our manufacturing process with slight OCD tendencies on quality assurance.