Polymer clay buttons are so much fun to make! They’re colorful and pretty. They’re machine-washable and dryable. Button-lover that I am, I have enjoyed making these little beauties since the 1980s, which adds up to lots of buttons. How can a person display buttons? A button cloth!
Since there were so many colors of buttons, I needed a colorful button cloth. Borrowing a color-meandering technique from quilter Jinny Beyer, I arranged the hues of the rainbow in different shades and tints.
Using the wonderful Ultimate Sweater Machine, I knitted blocks of color, alternating with cream and white. To join the strips of blocks, I used the join-as-you-knit method. Black and gray run along the long margins of the cloth.
After blocking the knitting, I added quilt batting and fabric backing. Then I quilted it and added binding all around.
It was time to sew buttons onto the cloth! It took a long time to work through my backlog of buttons. After that, whenever I made a new button style or colorway, I sewed a sample onto the cloth right away.
It’s such a fun piece to show. I always take it to my button workshops. People are surprised to learn that all the colors are the colors of the clay—no paint!