one of the great mysteries of knitting is how and when to place your buttons and buttonholes on the Front's of a cardigan come on in with me and we'll take a look at you know this is a stand-in for a button band on on a cardigan front when you're going to place your buttons there are a lot of different ways to do this with math or you know just figuring things out on with a pen and paper but here's a really good way that works almost all the time say that I want five total buttons on here you figure out where you want your top button and your bottom button to be and then you cut either a piece of no stretch strings like a piece of cotton or linen or you know a piece of paper will do just fine that begins and ends at those button points at the top and bottom button now because we're gonna need three buttons in between we just need to fold our no stretch string or cotton into our no stretch string or paper into four equal segments you'll just mark those with a sharpie or with any other kind of permanent marker hold them up to your piece of knitting and then you know that those are the points where you are going to want to put the very Centers of your buttons you can use a similar technique in order to figure out the placement of your buttonholes what you're gonna want to do in those cases is to just take your no stretch string or piece of paper Center your button over the marks and then just mark the outer edges that's how long you need that's how much of a space you need to leave for your buttonhole whether you're knitting vert of band vertically or horizontally you just know that you need to leave that space blank for your buttonhole