Thursday, August 4, 2011

The Trouble with Buttons

Buttons - I love them but they can cause problems. Take these ones that I have pinned onto my coat for instance.

I purchased these vintage buttons on Etsy from LakeViewArts and they are beautiful and just what I wanted BUT they are too big for my automatic button holer on my sewing machine.

(By the way, these buttons aren't bronze like they look in these photos - they are actually black and very very shiny. And the fabric is much more black, and less grey...).

What to do now???

As far as I can see it there are two options:

1. I do the buttonholes by hand. This involves lots of finicky hand sewing and the end result will be a buttonhole that (more than likely) will look crap; or

2. I use the machine to do the stiches like the automatic function. This is harder than it sounds. I had several trial runs at it the other night and none of them turned out satisfactorily. Sigh!

It seems I should have done a bound buttonhole back when I started making the coat. I've never heard of bound buttonholes before until I found this tutorial today from Sewaholic. The end result looks very nice and finished, see:

But alas its too late now. You know it probably said something about bound buttonholes in the sewing instructions, but to be honest I didn't read them much because they weren't that much help... I kinda just made it up as I went along.

Any-hoo!

There is one way to solve this conundrum and thats to get more buttons - smaller ones - that can fit in the automatic buttonholer thingy on the sewing machine... I am yet to make up my mind on this. I think I need to do some more experimenting before I make a decision.

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