Cardigans and buttons go hand in hand, never separated. Rarely remarked upon. The button is integral to the cardigan, one of the last choices made and the first thing the hand reaches for.
I came to Corozo looking for two things at once. A button made here in the UK, and one made from a natural material that would let me play with colour and adapt it to each piece. Corozo answered both.
It is the seed of the tagua palm. Dried, it turns hard and dense and pale, and takes dye in a way that allows for any colour but with a natural effect. The grain drinks the colour unevenly, so the strength of the dye decides how much of the natural pattern shows through. A pale wash reveals the grain. A deeper tone closes over it. Within a single batch the buttons stay fairly even, fairly homogenous, but across colours the same material behaves differently each time. That range allows for some unexpected and surprising results.
Before Corozo, I worked mostly in Mother of Pearl, and I will again. But the two are not the same. Mother of Pearl can crack in time, chip, splinter. It offers little freedom in colour; you take the range nature gives you. And it feels precious, which is not a fault, only a different register. For now I wanted something a touch more day to day. Something to be lived with.
Being made in England matters as much as the material. My buttons come from Courtney & Co, a family business in a beautiful part of the country that I can travel to see. A button that belongs to the same landscape as the rest of the work.
A button is a quiet thing, and easy to get wrong. The wrong one sits on the surface like an afterthought, undoing in an instant the hours held in the knit beneath it. The right one belongs to the knit. It carries the same intention as everything around it. It closes the piece, in both senses.
Find the Corozo button in use across Cardigan Knitwear.
