How to Replace a Button

Series Summary

It is always fun to shop for new clothes, to buy new jeans or to come home with a brand new skirt. However, if you are a mother of five, the motto for clothes is: "clothes never go out of style." Hand-me-downs save money, time, and can save you from the pressure of keeping up with a constantly changing fashion world. Unfortunately, clothes, especially when worn by children, need repairs and modifications constantly. Kids tear clothes, lose buttons, and grow, which makes it difficult to keep the clothes nice looking and up to date. However, with a little help from the experts at Expert Village, saving money and using hand-me-downs can be easy!

In this free video series, watch as expert seamstress Karen Weisman teaches how to mend, patch, and hem clothes. Learn how to replace a button, how to thread a needle, how to use a sewing machine to fix buttons, how to remove old buttons from clothing, how to use a hand sewn blind stitch to mend rips in clothing, how to use a machine sewn satin stitch to fix holes in clothes, how to hem pants, how to use a cuffed hem on pants, how to hem pants with a straight stitch, how to hem skirts, and how to hem skirts with a hand sewn blind stitch. You don't ever have to throw clothes away, keep them functional and in the family for generations on end with the help of this fantastic clothing repair video series!

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Karen for Expert Village. Now let's talk about replacing buttons. We are missing a button here. Now it is a good idea to hang onto those little packets of buttons that you have. You never know when you are going to lose a button. Sometimes if you miss a button you can check here. A lot of times the manufacturer will put some spare buttons here and sometimes they will put some buttons on the inside. First thing to do is check the garment and see if there are any spare buttons already there. This one didn't have one but I did find a button that matched. Now for something like this, we lost a button and we have nothing to match. So I found a button that I thought would work and you just want to make sure that it fits into the button hole before you use it and you want to make sure that it is not too small for the button hole too because it won't hold in the button. Now on this sweater we are missing 2 buttons and they are pretty hard buttons to match. So you can either go to a store and replace all 5 of these buttons; 1, 2 3, 4, 5, remove the old buttons and put new buttons on or you can be a little creative. I found 1 button that matches pretty good. It is the same size, same style but it is not exact so I am going to put it on the bottom where it won't be noticed so much and for the top, I found this cute little heart button so what I will be doing is re moving this top button replacing it with the heart button. It goes with the motif of the sweater and I will take this button and move it down so we will have the original buttons here, the close match here and a cute little red heart button on the top. That will make that sweater useful again. "