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I was writing up my Instructable, which tangentially included stuff on qipao buttons, The Genshin Impact Cosplayer's Knot Guide and went looking for a good current page with lots of fancy buttons. I found two: pankou buttons from East Meets Dress which has more pictures and a shred more information on the making and similar from The Pankou which has the Chinese: 盤扣, 盘扣, pán kòu. It was only when reading the latter that I realized that 盤扣, a term I've seen before, actually meant the fancy button knots! Further down, they refine it further: 襻花盤扣, 襻花盘 扣, pàn huā pán kòu, which means floral knotted buttons which they explain is, basically, generic extra fancy. One might describe exact shapes like butterfly (蝴蝶, 蝴蝶, hú dié) but 襻花 describes with sufficient precision.

҉ː̗̤̣̀̈̇ː̖́(⊙。⊙)ː̖́ː̗̤̣̀̈̇҉.

After a little more fussing with translation and search, I landed on 扣盤花襻芯嵌, which brought me to Square inch and clever heart, every detail - exquisite buckle (Part 3) (part 1 is here and part 2 is here)

Now, each cord you use will have different characterisics unique to that type, and the shoelaces I use for my examples are no where near as slippery as most decorative cord choices, so I had to try this knot again in a more standard cord selection, in this case 3mm nylon satin cord. For a button, I would definitely want to use nylon or polyester over rayon as they are much more durable materials, able to deal with constant handling, wear and tear much more gracefully than rayon. Even so, nylon satin cord is far more slippery than the shoelace, and in order to get proper tension on the centre, pretty much all the slack had to be pulled out of the ears, although strangely enough as can be seen in the pictures, one ear was more stable than the others. Of course, if you tightened carefully and then reinforced the centre structure with thread, you could have larger ears if you wanted to.

Another way to get nice ear loops all the way around your polygonal knot is to tie it button style (knobby thing that you could put through a button hole or button loop formed on top of a short stem). There are more flower-ish buttons to follow, but whether the transformation is extensible to the entire family of flower knots is a matter for further research. Now, the knot here (see left) is tied with some nice ear loops because I could, but in practice you probably want the ears tight against the body of the knot so that they don’t catch and the cord doesn’t wear out prematurely.