Hockey Moms For Obama

Seriously, politicizing an entire sport is too much. I mean hockey? We weren’t going to go there. But then we got commissioned for a Hockey Moms For Obama by ACTUAL hockey moms. Well, hockey parents to be specific. We recently got some photos of the Hockey Moms and their Hockey Kids with the buttons!

We have sent out Hockey Moms For Obama buttons to key battleground/hockey loving states including Michigan, Wisconsin, Colorado, and Pennsylvania! Yes, Minnesota, we are working on buttons for you next!

Our Hockey Moms For Obama template for 1.25 inch machines can be found here!

Buttons Away

More shipping today! The photo above is from Rose and Jen’s 43rd LD button project. All those boxes are full of buttons. “Ohhhh yeah!” Jen said. We concur. They get so many buttons out the door. We’re continually in awe of them!

We sent out another Adopt-A-Battleground State batch of buttons today. The great state of Michigan was adopted by Sebastian. Ok, it was supposed to be Wisconsin, but at the last minute Jody and Sebastian had a numbers crunching meeting and decided Michigan was now more of a battleground state than Wisconsin since Obama’s numbers are steadily moving up in WI. Sorry WI, but WTG!

A big thank you to Sebastian for his MI sponsorship! Half went to Birmingham and half went to Michael Moore’s hometown, Flint. They also got extra Hockey Moms for Obama buttons. We know those will be greatly needed there.

Shipping out

Thanks to all the volunteers that showed up last Thursday to the button making party at the Georgetown Liquor Company. We got buttons made, lots of artwork cut out, and buttons sorted and counted! You all were great. We’re doing it again at Stellar’s Pizza this Wednesday. See the sidebar to the right for upcoming events of ours as well as other Seattle Obama button making events.

The buttons that got made at this party were sent yesterday as part of a 1000 button batch to the battleground state of Ohio! Also, we got out a batch of Veterans for Obama buttons to our friends at the campaign office in Colorado Springs.

The Ohio buttons were part of our Adopt A Battleground State program. The idea is someone donates the cost of a thousands buttons and they can choose which battleground state to send them too. So far we’ve only offered this to local adopters since we didn’t want to get overwhelmed with requests and not be able to fill them in the time we have left until election day. Therefore, we’ve kept this program purposefully quiet.

But I’m so proud of all the work everyone did to get this first 1000 Adopt A Battleground State batch off that I had to mention it and the wonderful adopter, Christine. Thank you so much Christine for the donation and the motivation to get these buttons out! She chose Ohio and that’s where they went. We split the batch to send them to two different campaign offices, 500 to Toledo and 500 to Dayton. Both offices said they were in desperate need of buttons and were excited to hear they were coming.

We have two other Adopt A Battleground State orders that we’re currently working on. If you’re interested in the Adopt A Battleground State program, contact Jody to see if we can currently take on more.

Button making parties!

We’ve got a lot of places and people that need buttons and we need help making them! We’ll be having weekly button making parties for at least the next month. The first one is tonight at the Georgetown Liquor Company. It was planned on short notice, but we hope some folks show up to help us get a big bunch of buttons made. The details are up at MYBO. If the event says it’s full, we may still be able to accommodate a few more people. Contact Jody to see about it. Bring scissors.

We’ll also be making buttons at the GLC on 10/2.

These two parties and all future ones at the Georgetown Liquor Company are 21 and over. However, we know some young people want to make buttons too. Therefore, we’re in the final stages of planning some all ages parties next door from the GLC at Stellar’s Pizza. Keep checking back here for info about those parties.

This Sunday we’ll be taking part in Buttonpalooza! This will be an all day button making extravaganza with our fellow Seattle button makers. You can sign up to make buttons for a shift, or if the slots are all full you can drop by to say hello and pick up a button or two for a $1 donation each.

In supplies news, thanks to all the donations coming in we’re now stocked with button parts for 10,000 buttons! Our printer has been buzzing almost non-stop printing out button artwork. We experimented this week with getting copies of the artwork made at Kinkos. Let’s just say it was an exercise in frustration and we’ll be sticking with our good old Epson Stylus Photo 820 printer, even though it’s a hungry ink beast.

Supplies purchase and Beth’s templates

The DNC and Donations

We must apologize for not announcing our recent trip to Denver and the DNC here before we left. We found out the Wednesday before the start of the convention that we had passes into the stadium event and had to scramble to make travel arrangements and get as many buttons as possible made to take with us. We were making buttons right up until we had to leave for the airport.

We had a fantastic time passing out buttons, attending various convention related events and of course getting to be there for Obama’s acceptance speech! Wow, what a special night that was, eh?! It’s taken us a week to recover and we’re slowly working on uploading tons of photos from the trip to flickr.

The other thing we didn’t get to announce before leaving was our new donate page. Buttons4Obama is now taking donations to fund our button making for the Fall campaign. We’ve tried funding it mostly out of pocket up until now, but our extra funds are quickly running out. If our efforts are something you’d like to contribute to, we invite you to check out the donate page. There’s several ways to contribute.

To that end, we decided to take a $1 suggested donation for our buttons while in Denver. We didn’t turn anyone away that wanted a button but didn’t have the cash, however, thanks to everyone that did donate we were able to raise $395! Thank you all so much!! We’ll update here about the specific supplies we end up spending your donations on. Above, that’s Jody in yellow passing out buttons outside one of the gates into the convention.

We took an estimated 1200 buttons to Denver. The few hundred we had left after the convention we took down to the Colorado Springs Obama campaign office while we were still in Colorado. We had a great visit with the folks there. They were hard at work late on a Saturday night preparing for the next day’s phone banking and voter registration activities. They explained to us they have a huge veteran population in Colorado Springs. The majority of their volunteers are vets and just that day they had 30 NEW vets come in wanting to volunteer!

They told us they could really use Veterans for Obama buttons. If you’re making or buying Veterans for Obama buttons send some their way care of their field organizer Nate Hundt. You can get their address here. I know they’d be very grateful for it. Keep up the great work Colorado Springs!