Showing posts with label buttonholes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label buttonholes. Show all posts

Monday, 25 April 2011

RTW Tailoring Sew Along - Bound Buttonholes

Following my buttonhole nightmare with Vogue 8604 I decide to learn how to do bound buttonholes and use them for my jacket.  I followed Tasia from Sewaholic tutorial and was pleasantly surprised to find out how easy they were. Sherry and Gertie also have brilliant tutorials. In fact it is dead easy when you doing isolated bound buttonholes, but when you need to do five, perfectly lined up the story is completely different.
I thought I had marked the placement lines carefully:
But somehow along the line, I ended up with two different buttonholes, so wonky that the only way to cover would be to get huge buttons. I was frustrated and only managed a lousy photo on my phone to share with my twitter followers.
CarmencitaB came to my rescue (as she always does, thank you!) and shared this link (from a blog that I now follow), which shows more complex bound buttonhole marking techniques. I didn't follow it by the letter but took what I needed which was mark, mark, mark!! I can only hope all those markings will disappear easily. I also basted all buttonhole lips before I started poking holes, to make sure they all aligned.
And the results were much better!
I have attached the outer jacket shell (minus sleeves) and inserted the fake flap pockets. Sherry shared a tutorial for jet pockets and I was determined to try them. But I confess, poking more holes in this jacket made me nervous so I stuck with the fake ones!

Saturday, 12 March 2011

Kimono Sleeved Jacket...Buttonhole Nightmare

What a nightmare it was to do these buttonholes! I'm going to stay clear of pattern requiring lots of buttonholes for a some time, since last night I almost lost the plot doing these.
I started at the bottom and my machine had no problems doing the first three buttonholes. But then it changed the buttonhole size completely. The difference wasn't huge so I continued but the remaining two were disastrous. One of the other things it did was to complete the buttonhole programme stitch without having stitched the hole thing. Have you ever tried to unpick a black machine sewn buttonhole on black corduroy? No, not possible. I tried but ended up ruining a bit of the lining inside. 

I fudged it and managed to have a finish garment that is usable.
I can honestly say I'm a bit traumatised with buttonholes and would rather insert invisible zippers for future projects. But button looks so lovely and I definitely don't want to go off them, just because I had a bit of trouble.

So what is your experience with buttonholes/ buttons? Have you had any problems? Do you have any techniques, tips or hints that help make it easy? I look forward reading them.

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