Tips for Adding a Button to Your Crochet Project

Sometimes when you add a button to your crochet project it looks pretty good at first when you sew it on, but then as you wear it, your button might start to pull at those threads and kind of stretch out that area where the button is attached. So I have a couple of tips for you on how to sew a button onto your project. The first thing I like to do when I'm adding a button to a crochet project is I like to crochet a tiny little circle, and I put it on the underside or on the wrong side of my button band first before I sew the button on. So let me show you how to do that. First, we're gonna start with an adjustable loop, so I draw a little E shape, flip that over onto the strand of yarn that's connected to the ball, place my hook underneath that, and then I tighten that a little bit, but you can make your adjustable loop any way that you like, you don't have to do it the same way I do. Then I like to anchor that by just taking one little chain and that doesn't count as anything, we're never gonna work into that, it's just to begin working into our adjustable loop. Now we're going to place six single crochets into our adjustable loop. So we'll insert our hook, yarn over, pull up a loop, yarn over, pull through two, that's the first single crochet and we're gonna do five more, one, two, three, four, five, and then we can tighten that loop up. Now at this point it could be big enough to sew onto the back of your piece, it really doesn't need to be that large. But I'm gonna show you how to do the next round in case you are using a lighter weight yarn like a sock yarn or something like that. Because that wouldn't make a very large circle so far if you had just done one round of single crochet. So I'm gonna do the next round, but if you're using a worsted weight you could slip stitch to join and then fasten off at this point. All right, we're not gonna join to do the next round, we're just gonna work two single crochets into each stitched round. So there's the first one, and the second one, here's the second stitch one and two, third stitch one and two, fourth stitch one and two, fifth stitch one and two, and the sixth stitch one and two. Okay, I'm pulling on that beginning loop to tighten the center of that circle up nice and tight. And then I am going to make a slip stitch into the first stitch of the round. This would work also if you had only worked one round, a single crochet, you just do a slip stitch there. And then you can cut your yarn leaving enough space to sew your piece to your project and pull that through. Okay, so you just have this little tiny circle and then that gets stitched to the wrong side of your fabric. So let's just imagine this is the wrong side of my button band, so you just lay it on here, and first I'm going to get rid of this beginning yarn tail here, I'm gonna weave it back and forth, and that might seem silly 'cause you could just tuck it inside underneath in between the two layers, but I don't want the inside circle to open up. So, I'm just gonna weave this back and forth to kind of anchor my yarn and keep it in place. Once I feel like that's anchored, you can trim it off and then we're going to sew this circle to our button band. And so keep in mind that as you're sewing this, you're sewing it onto the wrong side of your button band, but if you sew all the way through and make larger stitches, you might see a faint ring of where those are. So ideally what you should do is you should have this circle be just a little smaller or about the same size as your buttons, so when your button's on top, you don't see where you've stitched. But for the purposes of showing you that second round, this is just a little bit bigger but that's okay, I'll show you what it looks like even when you sew all the way through. So, you can do a back stitch like this, so you can take a stitch backward and go forward, I'm always working from right to left when I make these stitches, I'm inserting it behind where I came out and coming out ahead of where I came out before like that. This is a good way to go around or you could also do a whip stitch around the edge, you could really do any kind of stitch to anchor your piece, your little circle to your button band. So I should have mentioned this before is you're definitely going to wanna place your buttons on your button band and mark where those go, and this circle should be centered over where you are going to be sewing your button onto your button band. So you need to figure that out before you sew this piece on obviously, because you wanna have your buttons in the correct spaces so they match up with your button holes. All right, so I've made it all the way around, and then I'm just gonna weave in my ends, and you just wanna make sure you're kind of splitting through those yarns instead of just tucking it in between the two layers and cutting your off your yarn, you wanna really hide those in there well, going in between the yarns of your stitches to add a little friction so it can't undo itself, right? So there's our small little circle, that's what the other side looks like and you can see there's a faint shadow of where I stitched. It doesn't look absolutely perfect, you can see that sort of jog now. It's not really that noticeable though, I don't think anybody would really notice it but like I said before, if this is a little bit smaller than your button or about the size of your button it'll be even less noticeable. All right, so when you begin sewing your button on, actually, if your button has large enough holes in it and you're able to sew it on with yarn and a yarn needle, you can actually fit a yarn needle through those holes of your button, then that's great 'cause then everything will match and you already have that material you don't need to worry about it. But oftentimes our buttons have smaller holes in it then our yarn needle will allow us to stitch through. So we end up using thread. I'm showing you with a black thread so that you can hopefully see it a little bit better on top of this green with the white button, but you would use a matching thread either to the fabric or you can use matching thread to your button, whichever you prefer. So I've doubled my thread here and I'm going to tie a knot towards the end. If you leave your tail here, after you tie it a little bit longer, you can tuck that into your fabric so you won't have little threads sticking out, and it makes for a very polished finish. So I'm just doing a couple of overhand knots here all on top of each other to create a very solid knot. But if you've ever tried this before, you may have noticed when you try to take a stitch with that yarn, sometimes when you run your needle through, the knot will just pop right through your yarn, because your yarn, it's not as dense as fabric, there's little spaces between all the little pieces of your yarn, and this knot is really not that big. So what I like to do in order to start my thread out, I like to take a stitch like this somewhere near this is the wrong side of my piece, on top of that little circle, I take a little stitch right at the center, and before I pull the knot all the way to the fabric, I open up the space between the two threads like this, so you can see, maybe you can see on the table more or behind my finger more, see how this is open, and then you can put your needle straight through the middle of that. And then when you pull on this, you're not we'll catch on that thread and it makes a little loop and it's not gonna pop through your yarn. That's a great way to start out anchoring a piece of thread to your fabric without it popping through. So then you'll just push your needle through to the front, and you can add your button just pay attention to which way your button holes are going, and then take a stitch and you're gonna wanna just make sure that you are centered over that extra little circle that you made. And when you do this, keep in mind if your button does not have a shank on it, a shank is that little piece of a button that sticks down and raises it up off of the fabric. If you're making sort of a bulkier sweater, really anything worsted weight or larger, you're definitely gonna want to leave a little bit of a space here between your button and your fabric. You could stick a crochet hook in there underneath that loop so that it doesn't get pulled too tightly. And the reason why you do this is because you are going to be creating a shank with the thread. You're going to create a little raised section with the thread. So you're just gonna be sewing this button on, and sewing over whatever it is you put in there, you could put, you know, crochet hook or a smaller like maybe a pencil even would work okay. You don't want it to be too large because you don't want your button to be droopy and flopping when you button everything. But you do need a little bit of a space between your button and the fabric. So you go through many times, I like to go through, I don't know, to basically fill up that space. It doesn't need to be tight, like hard to get your needle through, but I usually go around and around and around until that space is pretty much filled up. And then once you're satisfied with how many times you've gone around, you can remove whatever it is that's in between your pieces and then you're gonna send your needle up to underneath your button, but on top of your fabric, so right in between like that, you can see it's a little loose, there's a little bit of space there, and then you're gonna wrap your thread around your button a number of times. And what you're doing there is you're creating the shank of the button. So you're raising the button off of the fabric just a little bit. And the reason that we're doing that is because once we put this through the button hole we need that little bit of space for our fabric to sit inside. And then when we've made it around to the back, you can just take a couple little stitches in place, smaller stitches, and then you can either tie off to your beginning yarn tail if you like, or at this point because you've made all those little stitches in one place a knot in your thread should hold pretty well, I've never had a problem with that knot undoing itself. So I'm just making a few knots on top of itself but you know, if you wanted to be extra thorough with that beginning thread tail, you could tie the two strands together, and then before you're finished, you can bury your tails inside your fabric like that so that you don't have any little thread tales hanging out. And then if you didn't tie it to the beginning thread tales you can also go back in and bury those thread tales as well. And you may have noticed, since this is so short I put my needle in first nearby, and then I thread my needle. That's a good way to get that thread to go where you want it to even if it's not long enough to go through the eye of the needle. All right, so there we have it, we have that little extra lining piece that we put on to make it extra strong. And then when your button is pulled on, yanked on, when you're not being careful taking your sweater on or off, then it's not going to start to distort that fabric like it would if it were only one layer. So I hope that this helps you when you are sewing buttons onto your next crochet project.