Button: Fluttershy
Sewing requires very careful hoof-mouth coordination, and either the patience to check your project every few seconds or the ability to feel it out with nose and chin. If you spend too much time on it you could end up hurting lips and tongue, probably neck too from all the hunching. At least she did usually. But that never stopped her. Fluttershy loved to sew; she probably loved it as much as her most fashionable friend did. The difference was that Fluttershy didn’t have magic. With magic sewing was simple, a snap comparatively speaking. With magic a pony used the most basic spell, levitation, and at most had to hold the cloth aloft which would make visibility difficult. Hoof made was a hard road to go down thanks to its tedious and difficult nature; even with inventions like the sewing machine it was hard. A sewing machine needs magic to operate, so if you aren’t a unicorn you better find one. Of course she didn’t care for the easy road, oh no, Fluttershy liked the fact that there was one thing she could push herself to do. Even if the result was just a patched quilt.
She’d taken up the hobby as a filly; actually it had been when she fell from Cloudsdale and landed on the ground. Upon finding Ponyville she’d asked for help to get home. Well, she’d waited nervously unable to ask out of terror until an old and very near sighted unicorn had tripped over her. After bumbling out a half heard explanation she’d been dragged back to the old mare’s home, a carved out tree on the edge of town. After stumbling around and muttering that she was lost, the mare had declared that Fluttershy would stay the night. And Fluttershy was grateful for that kindness…it didn’t however stop her from crying. She’d never spent the night away from home. The mare had promptly dropped a basket of buttons in front of her along with needle and thread, her reasoning was, “Buttons are beautiful, and sewing them on will take your mind off it.”
Fluttershy was not surprised to later learn that Buttons was in fact her name.
It was hard, and she struggled silently with it that night; trying her best to sew with nothing more than hooves and mouth, all the while watching Buttons as she worked her magic on a set of nearby dresses. But while her cheeks and lips began to ache, Fluttershy had stopped worrying and was instead invested in sewing. When the older mare had finally realized that Fluttershy was in fact not a unicorn she’d offered to do something else with the filly. Her row of little buttons was haphazard and falling apart, a few dropped right off. Fluttershy asked for lessons instead. They stayed up nearly the whole night talking fashion, and by morning Fluttershy had managed to master putting on buttons.
So instead of giving up or in, or letting it push her back, Fluttershy sat patiently with her quilt and sewed. She added several red buttons for decoration and support.