Have you guys ever heard of (or used) your button foot? No… I don’t mean your buttonhole foot, the plain old button foot.
Top Down:
Side View:
It’s basically a rubber coated foot that has wide gaps to allow for stitching the holes of the button to your garment.
The button foot is one of my favorite sewing machine feet that makes quick work of sewing on your buttons. Now you can’t use it for everything, but it’s perfect to use for light weight fabrics such as blouses and some skirts.
You can’t use it for heavy weight garments since you’ll need to build in extra space between the button and the fabric to allow for ease of movement between each layer of fabric (ie: the use of thread shanks). Do you know what I mean? Sewing on buttons with the button foot doesn’t give you much (if any) wiggle room between the buttons and buttonholes on the other side of the opening.
How it Works
Place the button foot on your machine and get your button handy.
Place your button on your garment, in the correct position and slide it all underneath the button foot and lower the presser foot lever to secure.
Adjust your machine to a zig-zag stitch AND do one of the following:
Either:
- Set your machine to ‘darn’ if you have that option, so the feed dogs aren’t engaged
Or:
- Set your stitch length to “ZERO”, so that your zig-zag stitch doesn’t have a lengthwise movement, it only has a width-wise movement.
When you don’t have any stitch length while your machine is on a zig-zag stitch, the needle just moves left-right-left-right which is what you want in order to sew your buttons on.
A good tip is to find your appropriate zig-zag width on a scrap of fabric first. I always use the fly-wheel by hand as to not damage your needle by bashing it in the button (and missing the buttonholes).
Once you have the correct width selected, you can use the foot pedal and zip right through your buttonholes in a matter of seconds.
After I’ve sewed on all of my buttons, I always take a needle and thread the left-over thread ends from the right side of the button to the wrong side and tie them in knots before trimming the thread ends off completely.
And there you have it! Quick easy buttons sewn on by machine in a matter of seconds.
My finished blouse with machine-stitched buttons:
Buttons with the buttonholes over top:
Sewing on buttons with my machine is one of my favorite things to do and cuts the time in half (or more).
Have any of you guys tried your button feet before? Once you try it, I bet you’ll never want to do them by hand again. :)
In: Tutorials
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