Anna Zilboorg’s Perfect Buttonholes
I learned to work these pure-genius buttonholes from Anna Zilboorg at Sock Summit 2011 and couldn’t be satisfied until I’d deployed them in a design of my own; they form the perfect polished closure for my Winter Garden jumper. The technique makes them the most complicated buttonholes I’ve ever worked, but the result is a stable, self-faced button band of stockinet fabric with astonishing tubular openings for the buttons—perfect is truly an apt descriptor. Although the directions are quite involved, they can be accomplished by any knitter familiar with grafting, or Kitchener stitch. Interweave Knits offers a video tutorial with Anna herself for $4.99, which I’m sure is money well spent. (And I hope Anna is getting a share of the profits by the download!) I never wish to undercut any designer’s work and so I won’t be posting a video of my own. But I know Anna wants more knitters to know about her innovation and hope she’ll not mind if I post some photos of my own button band process that will support your work through the particulars of the technique as used in Winter Garden. I’m going to assume you’ve got the Winter Garden pattern in hand or a copy of Anna Zilboorg’s Knitting for Anarchists, in which she first imparted this piece of wizardry. To keep this tutorial general, I won’t give stitch counts except as regards the buttonholes themselves. All the photos in this tutorial will get bigger if you click them.
We’ll begin with stitches picked up along the edge where you’re going to work the button band. You’ve worked three rows of stockinet (purl a row, knit a row, purl a row) on these stitches and you’re ready to do the row that establishes the buttonholes. Having knit to the position of the first hole, you work three stitches in waste yarn—that’s the white yarn you’ll see below:
