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Dorset buttons are a very old style of button that is handmade from embroidery floss or yarn, wrapped around a ring-shaped base. They look smashing on a knit or crocheted sweater. . . or a bag . . . or a hat. You can also glue a pin-back on a Dorset and wear it as a fun accent. They aren't as hard to make as you might think.
- Plastic drapery rings. You can get these (cheap!) at most fabric stores. They come in different sizes. I'm using 1 3/8" rings here.
- Yarn or floss. You can make these with lots of different things, including: pearl cotton embroidery floss, crewel embroidery wool, or any sport or worsted weight yarn. (By the way, wool or acrylic yarns work fine.)
- An embroidery needle -- big eye and dull tip.
- Scissors.
Step 1: Cut yourself a very long piece of floss or yarn. Dorset buttons are usually made with one continuous piece of floss, so you need enough to complete your whole button. I usually measure out the length of my arm, three times, and that's plenty. Thread this piece on your needle.
Step 2: You'll need to capture the loose end of your floss underneath the stitching you'll be doing in just a moment. So, lay the end of your floss against your drapery ring, as shown.
Step 3: Now, you're going to cover this ring with blanket stitches. So, still holding that loose end in place, bring your needle up through the center of the ring.
Pull all that looooong piece of floss through, until you have just a small loop showing.
Step 4: The photo below shows two important things: first, after you've covered about 1/4" of your initial loose end in blanket stitches, you can cut the rest off and then keep stitching. Second, you may notice that I've turned the ring over. This is fine -- I prefer to stitch from left to right once I've covered up my loose end. You may find that you like this better, too.
Step 5: So, keep blanket stitching until you've covered up the entire ring. If you're doing it right, you should see a nice little seam developing along the edge of your ring as you work.
The process is much faster with crewel or yarn.
Step 6: Once your ring is all covered, then it's time to slide that little seam from the outside of the ring to the inside. Just work your way around, moving a section at a time.
Step 7: Now you're ready to make some spokes! This is the only tricky part of this process. You still have a long, long tail of floss attached to your ring. And now that you've rolled your seam to the inside of the ring, the end of your floss is now facing toward the inside of the ring as well.
We're going to wrap this tail of floss over our ring several times in order to form six equal spokes of floss. To begin, pull your floss across your ring, as shown in the photo below, wrapping it around the back of the ring and back up to where you started.
Now, wrap the floss behind the ring again, but this time, you'll wrap toward the front from a new location, 1/6 of the way around the ring from your first spoke. Don't panic when the spokes don't line up. Refer to this picture...
Keep wrapping, placing each spoke at 1/6 intervals, until you have six spokes. These spokes should be wrapped very snugly around the ring. They should meet in the very center of the ring on the front. (On the back, they will look all wonky. Don't worry about this for the moment.)
Step 8: Now that you have spokes, we need to anchor them in place, and get the back of our ring into alignment with the front. You do this by making a few tight stitches around the center point of all these spokes. So, hold your ring so you're facing the front side.
Bring your needle up on one side of the center point. Then you stitch down at the opposite side of the center point. And pull this tiny stitch tightly. As you pull, you're also pulling the center point of all your spokes toward the exact center of your ring. And, by magic, the wonky spokes in the back will begin to align with the spokes in the front.
Move forward to the next spoke, and do the same stitch. The photo above shows the path of your needle. Keep working in this manner, taking one back-stitch around each spoke and moving around and around the wheel. Within a few rows, you'll see a little pattern emerging.
Step 10: When you've filled in the whole center of the button with stitching, then it's time to tie off your thread. By this time, you will have stitched your way out to the edge of your button. Just pass your needle under about 1/4" of the yarn you blanket-stitched around the ring initially. Then, cut the loose end close to the button.
When I make these with pearl cotton, I like to switch to a smaller needle for this last Step. If you're using thicker yarn, your embroidery needle will slide under the blanket stitches just fine.
Now that you have the basic technique down, you can start playing with variations! You can, for example:
- Do your back-stitching in a different color than your ring and spokes.
- Wrap your ring with two different colors of floss at the same time, for a mottled effect.
- Make some stitches around the ring in a contrasting color.
- Sew beads to your finished button.
- Turn your button over, so the back-stitching looks more like basket-weave.
. . . And to stitch one of these babies onto a garment, you just make tiny stitches through the center of the button, using the same color of floss so it doesn't show.
