Buttonholes
Buttonholes may be worked or bound.
Bound buttonholes aren't as durable as worked
buttonholes, so they are best left to fine tailoring, but
they are the basis of other techniques, so I'll discuss them
perfunctorily at the end of this section.
Whether worked or bound, you should always use scraps
from your garment, facing, and interfacing to make a
practice buttonhole and find out how these particular
materials will behave. This is especially important when
setting up a machine to make worked buttonholes.
Don't forget to try one of your buttons in your practice
buttonhole. It may or may not be necessary to sew it to
something for a realistic test.
Worked Buttonholes
The easiest way to work buttonholes also gives the best
results: use a special buttonhole machine that attaches to
a straight-stitch sewing machine and moves the fabric back
and forth under the needle according to a template dropped
in the back. These machines, unfortunately, are quite rare.
Most new sewing machines include an "automatic"
buttonholer that gives tolerable results. Follow the
directions in your sewing-machine manual.
Any zig-zag sewing machine will make a buttonhole.
First, work a bar tack with the zig-zag set at maximum width
and the needle as far to your left as it will go. Count the
number of stitches in the bar tack as you make them. Then
set the zig-zag for a shade under half the maximum, and
stitch for the desired length. Make another bar tack, using
the same number of stitches as the first. It may be
possible to make this bar tack by holding the stitch-width
lever, thus not disturbing the setting of the half width.
It may also be possible to drop the feed dogs to make the
bar tack, and thereby not disturb the setting of the stitch
length.
With the needle down in the fabric on the left, lift the
presser foot, turn the fabric, put the presser foot down,
turn the handwheel until the needle almost comes down to the
right of the buttonhole, raise the presser foot slightly and
move the fabric to make the needle come down in the middle
of the bar tack, repeat to get it to come down precisely in
the left end of the bar tack
Check your stitch length and width, and stitch back to
the first bar tack.
Pull on the ends of the bobbin thread to pop the needle
thread through to the back. Secure the ends as seems
appropriate. When in doubt, thread the ends into a needle,
take a buttonhole stitch over the bar tack, and slide the
needle under the stitches on the wrong side for a quarter
inch or so, then snip the threads close under slight
tension, so that the ends pull back inside the stitching.
The ending tails are more likely to unravel than the
beginning tails.
When making a series of machine-embroidered buttonholes,
do not cut the thread between buttonholes until you are
finished. This avoids breaking your rhythm, and also keeps
the thread ends out of trouble.
Hand worked buttonholes can be more durable than machine-
worked buttonholes, but they are usually found only in fine
sewing. You should learn how to hand-work a buttonhole, as
this is the only neat way to repair a buttonhole that has
come unstitched.
You make a hand-worked buttonhole by cutting a slit,
then stitching around it to keep it from ravelling.
Some sort of permanent basting is needed to hold all the
layers together and stiffen and strengthen the edges.
Sometimes I'll make a machine-embroidered buttonhole, with a
loose stitch length and no bar tacks, and embroider over it.
This not only holds the layers together, but gives me a
guide for the embroidery. The traditional method is to work
one or more rows of running stitch around the proposed slit.
It is possible to work over a thin cord or heavy thread,
to pad the embroidery and strengthen the edge.
Never cut a buttonhole before you are ready to work it,
lest handling cause the edges to fray. Always put in your
permanent basting before cutting the buttonhole.
For fine sewing, there is a special knotted stitch
sometimes called "tailor's buttonhole", but I find that
ordinary buttonhole stitch (small-scale, closely-worked
"blanket stitch"), answers all purposes in rough sewing.
It makes little difference whether you make the stitch
by putting the needle down in the fabric and bringing it up
through the hole, or work it by the slightly more-
complicated method in which you go down in the hole and
bring the needle up through the fabric. Your book of
embroidery stitches will have an impassioned preference for
one or the other, probably because the author finds the
other method hard to work neatly.
Begin sewing a buttonhole at the end that won't be
covered by the button, work around the business end with
stitches radiating outward, work back to the beginning, and
neaten it with a bar tack. You may buttonhole over the bar
tack if it suits your fancy, but such stitches are purely
ornamental -- and, in my opinion, don't look all that great.
Sometimes it's a good idea to force an awl through the
fabric at the business end before cutting the buttonhole,
and hold this hole open with a few whip stitches when you do
the permanent basting. This gives you a little room for the
purls of the radiating stitches. When the shank of the
button is thick, fabric is actually cut away to make a
"keyhole buttonhole", but keyhole buttonholes belong to fine
tailoring and are beyond the scope of this book.
If nothing is to pass through an ornamental buttonhole,
fake it by embroidering without cutting a slit. Any
embroidery stitch may be used for ornamental buttonholes, if
you like the way it looks.
Bound Buttonholes
I've just read about a bound buttonhole that's easier to
make than mine and likely to give better results, so this
section will be more perfunctory than originally intended.
The better method is harder to describe, however, and I've
never done it, so you'll have to look it up yourself if you
get seriously into bound buttonholes or welt pockets.
My method is so simple to think of that it may be the
original bound buttonhole -- after all, it literally binds
the raw edges of the hole.
One cuts a straight-grain piece of fabric -- a scrap of
the fashion fabric, usually, but lining fabric and trim
fabric are also used, particularly when some of the edges
are also bound in the contrast fabric.
Baste the binding fabric to the right side of the
proposed hole, and stitch a rectangle where the hole is to
go. Cut a slit down the middle of the rectangle, splitting
the ends of the slit like the letter Y to end in each of the
four corners.
Push the binding fabric through the hole. If this is
done carelessly, the edges of the hole get folded through
too, making a neatly-faced rectangular hole. Some books
suggest making such a hole, then putting two pieces of
piping underneath it. I don't recommend that method, but
the faced-hole idea is likely to come in handy for non-
buttonhole purposes.
The binding should wrap around the raw edges, the
triangles at each end should be folded to the wrong side
inside the binding, and the ends of the binding should be
pulled into box pleats on the wrong side. Stitch across
each end of the binding to hold the little triangles and the
box pleats in place. It will probably take less time to do
this by hand than to put the zipper foot on the machine,
particularly if the hole is in something large and awkward.
Two faults you will notice instantly are that the
neatness of the buttonhole depends critically on the
accuracy of the initial slit, and the binding is unsupported
at each end where the triangle is folded to the back.
Berghe's buttonhole starts out like mine, but pads the
binding with its own substance, and is shaped by an easy-to-
make fold instead of a critical cut.
&&&
Apparently, I intended to put a citation for "Berghe's"
buttonhole here, but got interrupted. I no longer remember
what I was talking about.
&&
EOF