Botched button band

Forecast has been finished and blocked for a couple of weeks now.  It fits fabulously.  I found some buttons but stalled on sewing them on because I wasn't quite satisfied with the button bands.  Finally, though, I worked my way to pinning the buttons in place, just to see what a pseudo-finished-object might look like:

Not too bad, no?  Unfortunately, not that great, either.

I do like the contrast of the red against the grey (with the yellow of my walls, to boot -- hello, autumn!), but as you can see progressing downwards, the band becomes increasingly ruffly and fussy -- so much so that a couple of the lower buttons consistently get unbuttoned!  Oh dear.  Even after I read a ton of articles on how to pick up the stitches, accounting for the difference between stitch length and width.

The best thing to do is to frog both bands completely and reknit on smaller needles.  This time 'round I'm not going to slip the first stich of each row so the top edging tightens up a bit, and so the buttonholes end up a tad smaller.  There's no rush, really, since it's still summer (so hot during this photo shoot!).  Hopefully, the anticipation of having a new handknit sweater well and ready to wear in a couple of months will motivate me to get this done sooner rather than later.  Wishmeluck!