hi this is Dave with suspender store.com with another of our continuing series of videos all about suspenders today we're going to talk about how to sew buttons on the pants now you do that of course to wear button suspenders we get calls all the time from folks asking how to do that we do have a section on our website in our style guide which covers it in some detail but we're going to show you here how to place the buttons so first let's talk about the buttons that you're going to use suspender buttons are different than regular shirt buttons for one thing they're wider they're about 5/8 inch wide they also have curved edges rather than sharp edges and of course like most buttons they have four holes the next decision is whether to put the buttons on the outside or the inside of the pants by far most people put them on the inside of the pants now especially with dress pants but not everyone some people think it's more traditional to have them on the outside as they were worn that way long ago other situations where we see people putting the buttons on the outside of the pants are with work type suspenders like these logger suspenders and these rugged comfort heavy-duty western-style suspenders reasons for that are well you can see how large these button attachments are be kind of hard to put these to manage putting them on the inside of your pants it would just be difficult so it's a lot easier just to pop them on the outside and also they're so large that it would be hard to tuck all of the material inside your pants so if you're putting buttons on the inside of your pants you want to put them in the middle of the waistband now ideally the waistband is double thick so that when you sew them you can sew them only to the inside of the waistband so that the threads don't show on the outside of the waistband if you're putting suspenders on the outside then that's not an issue it the next thing you want to do is figure out how wide apart you want the buttons to be so looking at your leather strips the attachments or the runner ends whichever you're using you're going to want to figure out what the distance is that they should be apart on your pants given the length of these that's usually between two and a half and three inches myself I prefer right in the middle of that range at two and three-quarter inches what I recommend that you do is hold the suspenders up to you in a mirror and move the strap back and forth to try to see what distance looks best to you so then where do we put the buttons we're going to assume that we're talking about the traditional Y back suspenders here like I'm wearing which have the single strap in the back and the single leather strip also sometimes called a mustache or a rabbit ear and there you have one of these on the back and two of these on the front now most suspenders most button suspenders are made that way the vast majority occasionally you'll have an X back button suspender like these work suspenders that really need to spread the load out on these you need to measure what the specific distance is I think I did these last night in this was about seven and a quarter inches for a button to button on the back so that's where you'd place them so what you then need to determine so on the back you're just going to split that two and three-quarter inch difference and so you'll go out one and three-eighths inch from the center on each side in the rear to put your buttons on the back of the pants now the Front's a little more complicated and the main reason for that is is that everybody's body is different so there's I I don't think that you can give just a hard-and-fast distance about where you place the buttons so there are several schools of thought on how to do that now one is if you're wearing pleated pants you are supposed to put the button the front button the ones closest to the front of your body over the pleat so that the tension when you're when the suspender is you know giving you your support it's pulling directly up the pleat so it keeps the in the fine shape another school of thought is is that you want to Center the buttons around the belt loop on the pants now those may work for you but they may not because once again your body may be different so what I advise people to do is to take the suspenders and put them on the back and then just lay them over your shoulders and look in a mirror and see how they fall best on you and once you see how they fall best on your body regardless of where the pleat or the belt loop is mark those spots and then you make sure that's the even distance on each side and then when you measure that from the center of the pants make sure to take into account that the fact that the pants overlap here in the center where the button attaches for or if you have a hook there over the zipper so make sure you take that overlap into account just to get your distance right on each side so then mark those spots so the button is on and you're done okay so if you don't want to sew buttons onto pants you don't have the ability to do that we have a couple other alternatives we have here two types of buttons that you can use that you don't need to so the one in my right hand here is a permanent button this is what you find often on on blue jeans it's like a that there's a metal or plastic looking metal looking plastic button here and a little screw stud and you just hammer these in through the pants material and so if the buttons on the inside the little stud will show on the outside these are permanent obviously and they look great on jeans I've put a few on myself then another alternative is this is a movable button and so the way this works is it slides down onto the top of your pants and you just lift this little flap up and they clamp on to your pants and they hold really well now the only downside is is that if you put the button on the inside you still will see this little you know chrome square on the outside but it's another way to wear button suspenders you can move these from pants - pants they work great we sell both of these on the website like all buttons they come in sets of six they're just two other ways to get button suspenders on I hope that we've sufficiently buttoned up this issue for you if you have any questions please give us a call at you