The Blue Button stitches the community together

BY KADIE TAYLOR

THE LAFAYETTE SUN

LAFAYETTE — The Blue Button stitches the community together through personalized embroidery, quilts and more.

“We opened here in 2023 with the plans to be a quilt shop,” said Owner Adee Nelms. “The truckers and loggers kept coming by, and they would say, ‘Oh, that's a really cool machine. You can make us hats.’ And I knew there was no way my longarm quilting machine could make hats. So one finally said, ‘If you'll get an embroidery machine and make us hats, we'll buy hats from you.’”

After realizing the demand for embroidered hats for local businesses, Nelms said she bought an embroidery machine and began learning.

“I thought, there is a demand, there is a market for it,” she said. “I had no clue what I was doing, none at all. I thought, it's needle and thread, I can figure it out. So we got our first embroidery machine and started making hats right away. We've added more machines since then, and I've made hats for five different businesses just today.”

In order to further provide for the needs of the community, Nelms said she does not have a minimum on how many items a business needs to purchase to make an order.

“We love supporting small businesses, and because of that, we have no minimums on the order amount,” she said. “A lot of embroidery businesses will require you to have a minimum of 20, 50 or 100 hats. I will do a single hat for somebody if that's what they need, because we're a small business and we understand that small guys can't always hit those large minimums.”

Nelms said she offers a variety of quilting services, ranging from custom quilts to longarm service.

“Our quilting is almost threefold,” she said. “So I have a longarm service, which is where someone else finishes a quilt top, they bring it to me, I quilt it and then return it to them for them to finish it. The main thing that I do is longarm quilting. We also do custom quilts, a lot of memory quilts and T-shirt quilts for people.”

Nelms said she has enjoyed working with the community and that she has received positive feedback from customers.

“It's been fairly positive,” she said. “We have a very fast turnaround; most things are same day. Every now and then, we have a project that takes a little bit longer, but the typical turnaround time is absolutely within a month, and usually within a week. So we just try to keep things very easy for our customers.”

Nelms said she began sewing when she was looking for a creative outlet and reached out to her grandmother for lessons.

“My grandmother was a seamstress,” she said. “She worked for Levi's for years. I would always hear her talk about how she loved sewing so much, and she really was an inspiration. I had gone to art school in college, and when I came home to be with my kids when they were little, I couldn't do the type of art that I had been doing before, because a lot of it was just not stuff that children need to be around. And I called her one day, she was 86 years old, and I said, ‘Can you just talk me through threading a sewing machine?’”

Along with with teaching her the skills to sew, Nelm’s grandmother was the namesake of The Blue Button highlighting her habits when storing buttons and her philosophy on what they represent.

“I always felt like that was a connection with her,” she said. “The Blue Button is named after her, in a sense. She used to keep jars of buttons, and she always kept her blue ones separate. Blue was her favorite color. It's my favorite color. We had a very large family, and her little saying was buttons hold things together, and it was kind of that representation of our family. People just hold each other together. So, that's where we got the name.”

For more information, visit The Blue Button on Facebook.