Teamwork Makes the Feast Work

No pictures yet, (the saddles are still in my car) but yesterday I went up to Leslie's farm and borrowed her two sidesaddles for my Feast School Day presentation. Oh, my, what treasures! As soon as I get them into the house, I will take some pics and share them here. You're in for a treat!

Leslie and I make a good team with our skill sets complementing the other's so we are helping each other a lot as we both prepare our booths for the Feast. Sewing buttonholes on older machines, Janome or not, was tricky for both of us in the past.  

Using sleeve buttons doubles the number of buttonholes that must be put into a trade shirt, but my new Janome makes them easily and beautifully. 

So, I offered to do the buttonholes on the trade shirts she is making to sell at her booth.

I put in different sets of sleeve buttons for her to choose from.

That enabled me to see how they looked across several different block print fabrics.

I had been thinking the brass and metal sleeve buttons would be best, but now I think the fancier ones will work well, too. 

The only clothing that I currently make that would use sleeve buttons are trade shirts (worn by men as well as some women who hunted and trapped in the wilderness)

and chemises (also called shifts.) EVERY woman wore a chemise, so that is the bigger market for the sleeve buttons I am making.

I have found three different smaller and more delicate buttons that are working really well for the chemises.

Because they have both been involved at the Feast for decades (they actually met there) Leslie and Rick are very well known.

People flock to their tent when it is open and they rarely get a moment to sit down and catch their breath. 

Me, I have a very loyal core group of customers and get lots of drop ins, but I am not nearly as well known as they are. 

So, when Leslie asked if she could take some of my sleeve buttons to display and sell in her booth, I jumped at the chance. It will be good exposure for me and my guess is that she will sell more of them than I do in my own tent. 

Like I said, we make a good team!

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!