For the last few months I have followed an ‘Irish Crochet Lovers’ group on Ravelry. Each month we are set a challenge to master different elements or themes. This month’s element is a buttony.
I found a lovely pattern in a book called, The Techniques of Irish Crocheted Lace by Ena Maidens. The pattern is of a bunch of grapes. I love this pattern because it shows off the technique to great effect and I was excited about starting.
On reading the pattern from the book, I found it made no sense in comparison to what was shown in the picture. The pattern said to chain 8 stitches which would give a giant hole in the middle. I tried it with a smaller number of chain stitches, still this didn’t give the desired effect. I watched a video on the technique, albeit it was not a traditional Irish site but I didn’t like their technique; it suggested going around and around in a circle overlapping the stitches until the hole closed up. I decided to create my own method.
The trick to buttonies it seems is to get the buttony as packed as possible with stitches and end up with only a tiny hole in the middle. I thought it would be easier to fit in all the stitches, if the hole was large at the beginning and then could be closed tight afterwards. Thus packing the stitches tightly together. I also needed some padding to bulk up the buttony. I have seen people wrap the cotton around the back of a pencil to get the padding needed, but having just 1 strand of thread wrapped around the back of a pencil 16 times would be hard to close up at the end. So I had to come up with an alternative method.
My method goes as follows; I cut 3 lengths of cotton roughly 8″ long and laid a 4th beside these without cutting it from the ball of yarn. I wrapped these 4 times around the back of a pencil, so I now had 16 loops. I worked as many stitches into the loop as possible and when I was finished, I pulled the ends of the threads to tighten the hole and make the stitches even tighter. The 4 strands made the tightening of the buttony much easier. As the yarn lengths are covered in stitches once you are finished you can just snip the yarn ends as you find them.
Here’s my finished piece:
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