Button, Button, Who’s Smashin Buttons?

A few days ago I was feeling very frustrated and pissy. I could not work, I just needed to smash something. So I took this bag of metal buttons that I had on my vintage Etsy shop and decided to just smash the living daylights out of a couple dozen of them. They were dated and hadn't sold, so I didn’t care if I trashed them out, but I figured a few might become interesting!

So I smashed and smashed, with my hammers, with the claws, with a ball peen. On some, the plating peeled off, others turned out to be plastic, but quit a few became much more interesting. Especially the solid brass ones and the hollow filigree ones.


After I smashed them, I dumped them all in a dish of bleach to get a patina on them. And whoa, some rusted and foamed in minutes. And as you can see from the photo on the right, they look like they had been buried for years. Then I cleaned them up with fine steel wool, some a lot, some just a little bit as I did not want to remove too much of the patina. I’m pretty happy with this little experiment and plan to use some of these in jewelry assemblages, look for photos of these in a future post.
All images © copyright Christine Marie Davis