It’s actually amazing what you can teach yourself given an hour or ’sew’ to focus. After finally fixing up Max’s gi (one of the bigger boys at Brazilian Ju-Jitsu ripped it up) I decided it was time to teach myself the buttonhole! For Christmas I received Cath Kidston’s awesome book Sew, complete with bag project. Problem is I’ve been too scared to tackle the project because of those dreaded buttonholes required to attach the bag strap. Well, turns out they’re not so bad! With not so much help from Alison Smith and surprisingly my machine’s manual I set to work and with a few tweaks managed something that resembles a buttonhole in about an hour (and most of that time was spent threading my machine because the naff cotton I’m using keeps snapping).

Anyway given The Sewing Book’s reputation as a seamsters’ Bible (which I have to agree is, most of the time) I was a bit disappointed to find it lacking a clear step-by-step explanation of how to actually create a buttonhole – how to position the foot, which stitch to use, what to do to adjust the stitch balance etc. Sure enough it includes beautiful photographs of each stage and when you’d use the different types, it even gives instructions for the more fancy buttonholes but honestly I’m a total beginner you have to spell this all out for me. I still haven’t managed to work out how to round the corner for a keyhole buttonhole but I will. So… take a look at what I did, all by myself!

Here I’m learning how to build the stitches:

My buttonholing foot:

And here’s a close up!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 at 10:07 pm and is filed under Craft and tagged as books, buttonhole, fun, sewing. Print this blog post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.