“Scratch,” in this case, is milk and lemon juice or vinegar: their powers combine to form casein, a material that starts off easily moldable and then grows very hard. Well, there’s really only one thing to be done when you are faced with such a material. Life gives you casein, you make buttons!

Unfortunately googling “casein button moulds” doesn’t help much. Wait. Brainwave: Didn’t somebody post about making vintage button moulds for chocolate buttons? Yes. Yes, somebody did. Now we’re cooking with…casein, I guess.

I’m definitely going to be experimenting with this over the next couple of weeks. (If it works well, maybe we’ll have a buttonmaking class?!)