Making Shirt Buttons and Sewing Hems

Abstract

Do you know how shirt buttons, or for that matter any buttons used as fasteners for garments, are made? I had always assumed that they were sawn off discs from an extruded plastic bar with the holes as tubes already in the bar. But no; first a flat sheet of resinous material is cast, and blanks, almost the same diameter as the final buttons, are punched out from the sheet before it has cured. Then the blanks are drilled and the surfaces machined. Finally they are polished before dispatch. The main reason for the process is so that subtle layering can be built in during the initial resin casting to enhance the resulting reflective properties.