Buttonholes are Hard

At least, the 18th century hand sewn ones are.

I'm learning a new skill. One where the learning curve is steep with the degree of difficulty being much higher than anticipated.

In an effort to up my 18th century sewing skills, I've decided to hand stitch my buttonholes. (Insert laughter here.) I had NO idea that this would be so difficult.

I started by watching a short video from a very trusted 18th century sewing source. The video was under two minutes long, so I got the mistaken impression that hand wrought buttonholes were easy to make.

I even watched it twice and my confidence grew - I'm an experienced sewist, I can do a buttonhole stitch easy peasy, and this would be a nice way to make my historical clothing more correct. (Insert more laughter.)

It looked so easy that I almost skipped practicing and went straight to making buttonholes on the trade shirt I was working on. And that's where being an experienced sewist saved the sleeves on that shirt - I knew better than to skip making a practice one, easy as handmade buttonholes were to make. (Ahem!)

Good thing I did. Just looking at this picture of my prepared materials, I can see the disaster that unfolded next.

I used white cotton for my practice fabric and white linen thread for the buttonhole. That made it difficult to see my stitches. And, I marked my white fabric with a very light yellow chalk pen - I could just barely see the stitching lines!

What a mess the end product was!

I tried again, changing the thread to black linen (good idea) and the chalk pen markings to pink (another good idea) for visibility. I did not cut the buttonhole open before stitching this time (bad idea), thinking that that had been part of the problem. (It wasn't.) The first couple of stitches looked good and I was encouraged. Yep, this wasn't so hard!

Except it was, and while the second practice buttonhole looked much better than the first, it still had problems. Linen thread is a natural fiber and while historically correct, when repeatedly pushed in and pulled through fabric, the fibers begin loosening and fluffing. 

I made a third attempt, cutting the buttonhole opening first and switching to a normal sewing thread. Nope, nope, nope. I learned that I needed a thicker thread than that for a buttonhole.

This was so much harder, so much more frustrating, than it should be. I needed a better, more in depth video tutorial than the first. So I watched one from Vincent Briggs, the same man who had made the excellent tutorial on making sleeve buttons.

And that proved to be a very good decision. 

His video was almost 18 minutes long. He stabilized the buttonhole differently and more efficiently and he suggested using cotton perle crochet thread over linen ("because it frays and fluffs") or silk twist. ("Good, but so expensive. I use cotton perle and it's cheaper and works really well.")

I didn't have any cotton perle to hand, but I could try his other methods of making a buttonhole.

Version four with my "fluffing" linen thread, while a little wide, looked much more like it should.

I made a trip to the fabric store, found some cotton perle in two colors,

and am ready to try again today . 

I plan to make a few more practice ones and then, when I am confident that I am ready to work on the cuffs of the shirt that I have in progress, I'll take a deep breath, cut open those buttonholes (no going back after that!) and give it a go.

Wish me luck!