🎉 Portland Button Works is officially a teenager — we’re turning 13! 🎉

It all started on May 20, 2012, when we opened our little button shop on North Killingsworth in North Portland. Alex had been making pinback buttons since 2000, but this was a brand new adventure: a storefront workshop where folks could pick up custom orders — plus shelves of zines (Alex’s other passion) to browse!

A few years later, we moved into a secure warehouse on Interstate and continued to grow our shop and catalog. When the pandemic hit, we pivoted — moving our operation into our home (conveniently zoned residential/commercial) and shifting our focus more toward books and zines. That shift kept us afloat until people were able to gather again — and once again needed buttons!

Over the years, we’ve evolved — including rebranding our catalog of books, zines, and pre-made button designs as Spiral House. But at our core, we’re still here doing what we love: making buttons, sharing zines, and being part of this amazing community — whether it’s through the mail or in person at one of the many events we vend throughout the year.

💖 Thank you for 13 lucky years of support! Here’s to many more. 🎁 As our birthday gift to you: enjoy 13% off this week with code : BIRTHDAY13

The code is good for EVERYTHING in our catalog from custom items to zines, books, and more!

Embrace the new year with a burst of creative flair!

Portland Button Works is excited to present a special offer of 20% off on custom pin-back buttons, available from now through February. Simply use the code: NEWYEAR at checkout to infuse your style with a personalized touch.

Whether you're looking for a single button to commemorate an inside joke with a friend or need hundreds for your band, artwork, club, cause, or organization, we've got you covered.

We make buttons in 4 sizes: 1", 1.25", 2.25", and 3.5". Our parts are made in America, and the buttons are crafted right here in Portland, Oregon. Choose pickup in Portland, Oregon or worldwide shipping for your convenience.

Got my order from @upthewitchypunx today! Very excited to start digging in.

A couple of weeks ago, I started reading Brainscan 33 by Alex W. of Portland Button Works (@upthewitchypunx). Between that and exposure to lots of witchy readings and podcasts from my fiance and significant reflection on my spiritual past, I decided to go ahead and start down a witchcraft path. I’ve not read all of the zine yet, and I am very confident in my need for significant amounts of research. But I’m starting out in the secular part of witchcraft. I have a hunch that this will fit best and while that may shift, my hunches and intuition are usually pointed in the right direction.

The part of Brainscan 33 that I have been focusing on is the idea of altars as a (and this is my personal, generalized, working definition) ‘space and/or collection of things that is imbued with special meaning and reminds the creator of who they are as a person.’

If we assume this is a reasonable definition, and I apply it to my life, then I come to the following conclusions: The staircase walls where my mother hangs senior portraits of myself and my siblings is an altar. The other staircase wall where she hangs pictures of all sorts of things from her life is an altar. My bag of programs from concerts that I played while in undergrad (and the Spotify playlist that will come from it) is an altar. The box of cards and letters from friends and family is an altar. None of these are very formalized as altars or necessarily dedicated as such, but they are - by that working definition - altars in function if not exactly in form. || sidebar: I’ll probably explore musical practice as ritual someday -- it’s something I used to do but haven’t done in two years Now on to the part where I take this and shift toward the “witchcraft as the beginnings of part of a framework to help me process trauma” bit. From Sept 2017 to May 2019, I was a graduate student hired as an RA/TA (research assistant/teaching assistant) in a material science department. Currently, I mentally associate that whole time with trauma and have for some time been repressing that entire period of my life. 

Truth is that there were lots of really great things that happened and that I did while at that university. I was a scientist, teacher, a musician, and a queer mentor. I instigated justice and inclusion changes at the departmental level by just being me. I learned some really frickin cool stuff, and I made some pretty significant progress in the science portion of my work even though my heart wasn’t really in it.  

If I peel back the layers, the part of my existence that caused trauma was being pressured by a toxic graduate school culture to work more than was appropriate without any structure for how the work should look or how to pivot and adapt when things, inevitably, go wrong.

How does this relate to witchcraft? It wasn’t until I decided - this week - to make an ‘altar’ of things from my time at that university that I remembered all the good things that came out of that time. I spent about 20 minutes after therapy collecting trinkets from that part of grad school and putting them in one place. About half the items were something I had positive associations with but had forgotten about. By the time I had the whole pile together, it was a proper “pile of good things and bad things.”

My next step is to build a formalized altar (which won’t look anything like a “traditional” altar, it might literally be a box with trinkets and notes in it so maybe the better word will be “memory box”) and do some journaling in the lab notebook I’m going to use as a ‘book of shadows’ (quotes because I’m not sure what language I want to use yet) to really work through what these items mean to me and what that time meant to me.

I’ll challenge myself to be radically honest with myself and ask questions like:

Why did I keep this trinket? What does it mean to me?

Does it have primarily positive or negative associations with it? Why?

What stories do I have about this item?

And by telling these stories, I’ll discover more of the whole truth of the situation and I’ll be able to start seeing that period of time not as a monolithic ~bad time~ of my life but as the nuanced, complicated time of change that it was.