Button Embroidery

Following up on an article from Threads magazine, I dressed up this simple top with buttons from my enormous stash.  

You begin my machine basting a boundary for the area you want to define.  I used washable marking pencil and some jar lids to draw a scallop on the reverse side of my top.  

 

Then I set the stitch width to its widest and sewed along that line.

 

The thread is a pearl cotton, which proved a real challenge to locate.  After visiting the flea market, a specialist needlework shop and the two main department stores in town with a 'haberdashery' -- I couldn't make these quaint olde words up -- department (John Lewis and Fenwick), with no luck at all, I was sent to a hardware store in Whitley Bay, of all things.  They have a little crafts corner and there was the white pearl cotton embroidery thread I wanted.

You can only use flat buttons for this, not ones with a shank.  The object is to create a sort of spiders web over the buttons.  My object was to cover a small stain I couldn't wash out, but also to try this embellishment.  

I learned a few things I would do differently:  

• Not go twice between two buttons - parallel lines aren't spider webby enough
• Unlike in the magazine pictures, space the buttons further apart.  Getting the tension of the threads right is tricky and spacing doesn't hurt the look.
• I got everyone on more or less the way I wanted, but then I went back and make more 'web' to enhance the look beyond the need to secure the buttons

I expect I'll do this again on something else, perhaps a jacket lapel or the wrist of a sleeve.  I've got loads more buttons...