My friend is having a baby. We don’t know his name yet, but we affectionately call him Buddy. And today, said friend had a baby shower to celebrate his arrival!

For my present to dear Buddy, I made a ‘onesie’ baby romper from my beloved (yet ancient) Kwik-Sew for Babies. And, I suddenly remembered why I never, EVER, use pearl snap buttons on ANYTHING.

Because they are IMPOSSIBLE to set.

Seriously, I spent hours setting pearl snap buttons, and ruined half of my supply of them. I’m sure there’s a gadget that you can use to set them but I don’t have one (a gadget I don’t have? GADZOOKS!) so I ended up using some insane combination of balancing a ball peen hammer on top of the snap, and hitting that with another jeweler’s hammer. I ended up with about a 50% success rate, a few pokes from wayward prongs on misset button parts.

Here’s a detail shot. I haven’t worked with jersey knit in ages, but it went more smoothly than I anticipated. I was impressed with my little Viking – he’s a sturdy little sewing machine ;o)