Sewing Buttons Quickly and Easily

At sometime or another, we all have to sew on a button occasionally. Whether we pop it off of our shirt or whether we're sewing it onto a new garment it is a skill that we have to employ. Today I want to show you a method that will let you sew a button on in no time at all. And I think you'll really like how slick it is. First, I want to show you the differences between buttons. The first one here is what we call a shank button. If you notice, there are no holes on the top of the button as opposed to the type that we typically see on shirts that have two holes, or sometimes they'll have four holes that are exposed on the top. The shank button is often used on coats and tailored garments because it's going through a thicker fabric. And so it has a shank that raises it up off of the fabric. And then you sew through the holes here. So that is one type of button. And I'm going to show you how you can simulate the shank with this type of button in just a little bit. So the first thing that you want to do is get yourself a length of thread. You're going to fold that thread approximately in half and put it through your needle. And one of the easiest ways to do this is to take a dental floss that you can find in any drug store. And then you put your folded thread through the eye of the dental flosser, hold onto it, pull the dental flosser through the eye of the needle and then simply pull your thread through. Once you have the thread through, you're going to bring it down so that it is even at the ends or close to even. And go ahead and make your knot. So now I'm working with four threads instead of one or even two. And what I want to do is make sure I run it through some type of a thread conditioner. My favorite is bees' wax. And what this will do is keep it from knotting, tangling or breaking. So once I have that, then I simply come here, and remember I've got four threads. So I bring it up, my knot at the back will catch and I'm using bright threads so you can see this. I'm going to come down here, and at that point in time my button is sewed on with four threads. You could actually stop at this point, but if you're like me and just want that extra protection, go ahead, take another stitch. And now you have eight threads through that button Come to the back, go ahead, and I like to slip it through my fabric once. I'll usually come back with an X. And when I come back this time, I like to take my thread or my needle rather and run it back through that loop and bring it down. So it's nice and tight. And I do that one more time. It's a little tougher to pull with all that thread. Do it again so that you've got a good secure knot. And then I just run it one more time under the fabric just to pull the loose end in, cut it off, and just like that your button is on and it's not going anywhere. So that's how you sew a button on in just a fraction of the time. Now I want to show you how to make a shank button out of the standard button. We're going to do basically the same thing but I'm going to need more thread because I'm going to be making a shank this time. So cut yourself off a longer length of thread. We're going to do the same trick here of doubling our thread. Actually, I think I'm going to run this thread through before I put it in the needle. So I don't have to mess with the knot. Sometimes the knot catches. Typically I can run my knot right through but since that was a quadruple it was quite a big knot and it didn't want to go. So now I've conditioned my thread. I'm going to once again put my floss through the eye of the needle. And sometimes that, just like now, is the most difficult part. There we go. Put the doubled end through, pull my needle through and the thread, bring it down in half. Tie myself a good little knot and trim it off. Now the trick is with a shank button is you need to raise it up from the fabric and you can either hold it loosely and adjust your thread. Or you can use this neat little tool, it's called the Dritz point turner and button gauge. It's got a little ruler in centimeters and inches on it, so you can measure your buttons. You can use this for turning your collars or your cuffs for where you need to make the nice sharp point on a cuff. This is one of my favorite little tools. And then these little slots you can put here and you line it up so that you can see through and as you see, it's lifting the button away from the fabric. So you have two different ones for different weights of fabric. And this is the one that I typically use when I'm working on a wool coat or garment, because wool is so thick. It's also a good one to use if you're using a bound button hole, which is much thicker than a regular one. So now it just takes a little bit of coordination but you're going to, I like to go ahead and get my thread started. Okay. And you don't want to pull it tight, you want to leave it a little bit loose. Just like we did before. I'm going to come up and down. I'm going to do it twice. You can do more if you want. And then once I'm done with two times, I simply pull the button gauge out and you can see that I have a little bit of extra room there. It's kind of flopping around. So now what you do is you come up through your hole and with your extra thread, you literally are just going to wrap it around your button. It's really quite simple technique. And wrap it to your heart's content. You want to have a good shank there and you can see how it's filling in the gap. And then when you're done, I like to, if at all possible, take my thread through the shank. If I can get it in there. If not it's all right. And then you're simply going to come down and you can see how you have that nice shank there that now lifts up to make much easier for your button to be buttoned through thick fabric. And then we simply go ahead and finish knotting off our button, or rather knotting off the thread. I guess it would be hard to knot a button. Slip it through and make you knot, come back. We're going to make another lot going through that loop there of the thread. We now have our nice knot and then finish it off by coming through the fabric. So it has a place to hide the thread, trim it, and just like that you're all done. So I hope that these little tips will make buttons sewing a little bit easier and a little bit faster for you.