Goodness, two blog posts in one day, possibly because there's no machine knitting happening here just now; my knitting machine is off to visit the last repair person in the UK after my husband dropped a screw into it, oh dear.
Anyway, that leaves lots of lovely time for handknitting and a little crocheting for my knitwear for sale.
There are lots of crocheted button instructions out there in the webivserse and I've just tweeked and melded a few to make little flattened bobble buttons that work well in silky laceweight yarn for my knitwear.
Each button took me about 7 minutes to make and sew on (but I'm a pretty inexperienced crocheter) and used 0.225g or approximately 1.8m of yarn (I used Fyberspates Gleem) and a 2mm hook.
Make a magic circle and make 16 UK triple crochets (=US double crochets) into it. Pull the yarn tail to close the magic circle tight. Slip stitch into top of first triple to close the circle. Cut the working yarn and pull its tail through the centre, then using it to sew through the top of each triple (under both legs of the V), pull tight to close, shaping as you do (I find the shaping improved by initially pressing something stick shaped and c. 5mm diameter into the centre of the button while starting to pull it closed, then removing it to complete the closure). Double knot the two yarn ends tightly together. A little squishing and gentle edge rolling helps to form the Smartie/chocolate bean shape. Re-thread the needle with both yarn tails to sew on the fabric (this cuts down on time spent securing 2 ends and works well with a skinny yarn like this laceweight). The yarn ends can be lost inside the button after securing it to the fabric by sewing from the back of the fabric and out through the button's centre, pulling tight and carefully snipping off against the button.
It's best to push these delicate buttons through the hole, rather than pull them, which can pull threads loose and wonky. The buttons are not exceptionally sturdy and probably wouldn't survive much buttoning and unbuttoning but they're great on pieces like cowls where the buttons are used to decoratively close the loop and never undone again.
I’ve pictured the buttons here against fabrics knitted in 4ply/fingering equivalents. All the buttonholes are just a yarn over + one stitch decrease; a pretty tight squeeze for these buttons but fine in projects where the buttons probably aren't going to be undone.
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