Vinyl Belt Buckle and Interchangeable Belt Tutorial

That’s quite the mouthful, isn’t it? 

I’ve wanted to make belts with buckles before, but I have a hard time finding the buckles with the center bars at any craft stores near me.  Sometimes I just don’t feel like paying shipping—you will often end up spending over $5.00 for one buckle that way. 

Thus, the vinyl belt buckle was born.  SO simple!  And I’m going to show you how to make a belt interchangeable!

You can make the other side of the belt with a different fabric to make it reversible, like the one I googled and found here on Tarilyn’s Show’n Tell. 

OR you can use velcro to take them off the buckle and then make as many as you’d like to interchange. 

To make the belt buckle, download the free pattern here. 

You’ll need:

4” x 7” piece vinyl

glue stick

piping (optional)

1” piece velcro

 

First cut out two vinyl buckle pieces using the pattern.  My vinyl is pretty nice, thick stuff, and I only had to buy a really small part.  The back isn’t like the tablecloth vinyl you’ll see sometimes.  See picture below.

 

Optional step:  add some piping around the buckle outer.  It will give it a more finished appearance and can be super cute with contrasting colors.  I’d glue it and then sew it as close as you could to the edge, if you add this step. 

Place wrong sides together and glue. Let it dry for a few minutes, then sew around the outside circle, and the inside D shapes.  It’s a little tricky, and as you can see, I need a little practice to get it perfectly even!  

You know, I’d like the buckle to be a little firmer, but I’m unsure of how to do that yet.  If anyone has any ideas, I’d love to hear them.  Maybe another layer in between the two would help, but I don’t think my machine is up for that!

For the belt, I used the Plaid Belt tutorial on Sew4Home.  I just added piping to it, and also adjusted the width to 4” to account for the difference in the size of the buckle.  If you are unsure how to add piping, you can see some tips on my post here, or a really great tutorial is Lindsay’s post here on The Cottage Home. 

I used the rounded tip and added what I needed to.

 

Just a quick tip—to get my needle close enough to sew to the left of the piping stitching, I have to adjust my stitch width only over a bit—moving the needle to the left.  I also use my zipper foot.

It can get tricky around the curves, so make sure the needle is down, and then lift the presser foot and turn everything until you get around the curve.

I started on the straight end and curved the piping down.

Then I put the right sides together and followed with the tutorial on Sew4Home.  I left my gap on the long edge close to the straight end so I wouldn’t have to deal with the two ends of the piping ending.  I did not topstitch around the entire thing, though that might be better with the opening you have to stitch closed. 

One more tip:  sew on the side of the fabric that has the piping stitched to it, so you can follow the stitching used to attach the piping.

 

Test your straight end on your buckle, and see where you want to sew the velcro so it can wrap around the buckle center bar.

 

I did color around the edge of my vinyl buckle so that it matched better.

That’s it!  Now you can make as many belts as you’d like to that match your new buckle!

And even if you don’t make the buckle, now you can get a center bar buckle and interchange the belts you made with velcro!

It was hard for me to post this without making another belt to interchange with the buckle and show it in the pictures!  I honestly just didn’t have time.  But at least you know now how to do it if you want to!

Don’t forget to enter your own belts for the contest here.

You can still link up any belts you’ve made on this post here.