NO detail was left to chance in the blockbuster movie Harry Potter - right down to the last hand-stitched button.

And no one knows better than Marion Howitt from Swanage, who was given just five days to painstakingly craft 105 costume buttons for the ghostly Bloody Baron played by Terence Bayler.

She used traditional Dorset button-making techniques dating back centuries to create 55 large buttons for his coat, 40 medium for his waistcoat and 10 small for his breeches.

The Bloody Baron is the ghost of the Slytherin House at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. In the hit film, he can be seen flitting around the school with fellow spooks including Nearly Headless Nick, played by John Cleese.

Marion said: "It was a lot of work and by the end of the week I didn't want to see another button.

"Each large button took 25 minutes to make and they wanted them sent off by special delivery as soon as I did them because they were waiting to sew them on the costumes."

The Dorset button industry began in the early 1600s but the skills almost disappeared after 1851 when the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace displayed a button-making machine.

The mother-of-two, who teaches Japanese braiding, has also made buttons for the films Sleepy Hollow and Alice in Wonderland.

A member of the West Country Embroiderers, she discovered Dorset buttons when she moved to Swanage 25 years ago.

"I have always done a great deal of needlework and Dorset buttons were a new technique of needle-work I had not come across before," she said.

Marion's work can currently be seen at an exhibition of traditional Dorset textile crafts at Wheel-wrights in Abbotsbury.