Warlock279, excellent work!  I agree with the thicker threading for furniture, but I've seen some cheap upholstered stuff, where the buttons were merely ornamental, and very thin threading wrapped heavily through the holes was used.  I like Luxxeon's idea of starting out with a plane IF you can circularize it, because of the extraordinarily clean and uniform topology it provides, but I agree, I would have probably started with something closer to your example.

Even though Luxxeon's method contains less manual input (only if you have 3dsmax with that maxscript), I think Warlock's method is much more universally sound, and should work in literally ANY polygon modeling software.

Glad you posted that.  I'd like to see someone post a nurbs strategy for this object.  Any Rhino users out there?