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Buttonholes are hard
I had steeled myself to finally get round to sewing on a replacement collar button for the one that I pulled off while undoing my shirt, carefully put away for repair purposes, and then inexplicably lost :-p
But when I had located a suitable yellowish button from my collection (the original collar button was always a bit small anyway) I noticed that the buttonhole itself was completely raw; it had originally been machine-stitched in a zigzag rectangle and then cut open down the centre, as is nowadays standard, and the thread had worn through and evidently unravelled, leaving simply a slit in the layers of cloth. So before I could repair the button I had first to reinforce the edges of the buttonhole.
I started off using doubled sewing thread as a substitute for proper buttonhole twist, which I didn't have in any colour save a completely unsuitable dark brown. This was a mistake, because it proved virtually impossible to pull the two sides of the doubled thread through to the same length, and I was forever being left with dangling loops, and an extremely messy finish to boot. After I had accidentally managed to hook up a loop from the other side of the buttonhole (requiring me to cut the doubled thread in order to be able to free the needle to undo the resulting knot) I abandoned this attempt and started again with a single thread, which at least gave me more control even if it wasn't really thick enough to form the requisite solid row of knots/stitches along the exposed edge. After a lot of effort and working back over the existing lumpy doubled section I eventually managed to create a reasonably neat and workable result, but it certainly would not pass any Savile Row standards.
(click to enlarge)
It's like sawing parallel cuts; it really does take an awful lot more practice to get a neat result than you would think from looking at the simple principles of the thing. And it's not as if I haven't done a few dozen buttonholes in my time. I simply find it so hard to achieve a neat result (and especially on *both* sides of the hole, which in theory ought to match, but the portion you can't see while working it tends to be a mess!) that I actively prefer using the fancier bound buttonholes (which have a bad reputation because they are hard to do by machine).
Most people, of course, simply use the 'buttonholer' on their sewing machine and cut down the centre of the resulting rectangle -- although this leaves a raw edge between the rows of stitching it generally wears away in use in any case -- but since I don't have that option on my hundred-year-old machine I need to do the earlier tailoring techniques that physically enclose the cut edge, whether by knotting thread over it or by encasing it in a fold of cloth.... But really, using button-hole stitch is the harder of the two!
But when I had located a suitable yellowish button from my collection (the original collar button was always a bit small anyway) I noticed that the buttonhole itself was completely raw; it had originally been machine-stitched in a zigzag rectangle and then cut open down the centre, as is nowadays standard, and the thread had worn through and evidently unravelled, leaving simply a slit in the layers of cloth. So before I could repair the button I had first to reinforce the edges of the buttonhole.
I started off using doubled sewing thread as a substitute for proper buttonhole twist, which I didn't have in any colour save a completely unsuitable dark brown. This was a mistake, because it proved virtually impossible to pull the two sides of the doubled thread through to the same length, and I was forever being left with dangling loops, and an extremely messy finish to boot. After I had accidentally managed to hook up a loop from the other side of the buttonhole (requiring me to cut the doubled thread in order to be able to free the needle to undo the resulting knot) I abandoned this attempt and started again with a single thread, which at least gave me more control even if it wasn't really thick enough to form the requisite solid row of knots/stitches along the exposed edge. After a lot of effort and working back over the existing lumpy doubled section I eventually managed to create a reasonably neat and workable result, but it certainly would not pass any Savile Row standards.
(click to enlarge)It's like sawing parallel cuts; it really does take an awful lot more practice to get a neat result than you would think from looking at the simple principles of the thing. And it's not as if I haven't done a few dozen buttonholes in my time. I simply find it so hard to achieve a neat result (and especially on *both* sides of the hole, which in theory ought to match, but the portion you can't see while working it tends to be a mess!) that I actively prefer using the fancier bound buttonholes (which have a bad reputation because they are hard to do by machine).
Most people, of course, simply use the 'buttonholer' on their sewing machine and cut down the centre of the resulting rectangle -- although this leaves a raw edge between the rows of stitching it generally wears away in use in any case -- but since I don't have that option on my hundred-year-old machine I need to do the earlier tailoring techniques that physically enclose the cut edge, whether by knotting thread over it or by encasing it in a fold of cloth.... But really, using button-hole stitch is the harder of the two!