The Prettiest Gentleman About Town: November 2023

Since I've made videos on thread covered and fabric covered buttons, and sleeve links, it's time I made a buttonhole video too.

In this blog post I've written out the instructions for a basic buttonhole (which I first posted here on tumblr) but the video has some more variations, as well as more advice on measuring and marking.

Mark your line, a bit longer than your button is wide.

I usually use a graphite mechanical pencil on light fabrics, and a light coloured pencil crayon on dark ones. Sometimes I use a waterproof drawing pen on light fabrics. (I have fabric pencils too, but they’re much softer and leave a thicker line.)

It's a good idea to baste the layers together around all the marked buttonholes, especially if you’re working on something big and the layers are shifty and slippery. I’m not basting here because this is just a pants placket.

Do a little running stitch, or perhaps a running backstitch, in fine (preferably silk) thread around the line at the width you want the finished buttonhole to be. This holds the layers of fabric together and acts as a nice little guide for when you do the buttonhole stitches.

Cut along the marked line using a buttonhole cutter, or a woodworking chisel. Glossy magazines are the best surface to put underneath your work as you push down, and you can give it a little tap with a rubber mallet if it’s not going through all the way.

I’m aware that there are some people who cut their buttonholes open using seam rippers, and if any of them are reading this please know that that is abhorrent behaviour and I need you to stop it immediately. Stop it.

Go get a buttonhole cutter for 10 bucks and your life will be better for it. Or go to the nearest hardware store and get a little woodworking chisel. This includes machine buttonholes, use the buttonhole cutter on them too. (Or get a pair of buttonhole scissors if you're feeling fancy.)

If you continue to cut open buttonholes with a seam ripper after reading this you are personally responsible for at least 3 of the grey hairs on my head.

Do a whipstitch around the cut edges, to help prevent fraying while you work and to keep all those threads out of the way. (For my everyday shirts I usually do a machine buttonhole instead of this step, and then just hand stitch over it, because it’s a bit faster and a lot sturdier on the thin fabrics.)

I like to mark out my button locations at this point, because I can mark them through the holes without the buttonhole stitches getting in the way.

For the actual buttonhole stitches it’s really nice if you have silk buttonhole twist, but I usually use those little balls of DMC cotton pearl/perle because it’s cheap and a good weight. NOT stranded embroidery floss, no separate strands! It’s got to be one smooth twisted thing!

Here’s a comparison pic between silk buttonhole twist (left) and cotton pearl (right). Both can make nice looking buttonholes, but the silk is a bit nicer to work with and the knots line up more smoothly.

I’ve actually only used the silk for one garment ever (my patchwork dressing gown) but am going to try to do it more often on my nicer things. I find the cotton holds up well enough to daily wear though, despite being not ideal. The buttonholes are never the first part of my garments to wear out.

I cut a piece of thread about one arm’s length more or less, depending on the size of buttonhole. For any hole longer than about 4 cm I use 2 threads, one to do each side, because the end gets very frayed and scruffy by the time you’ve put it through the fabric that many times. And because a very long thread is a lot more cumbersome to work with.

I wax about 2cm of the tip (Not the entire thread. I wax the outlining/overcasting thread but not the buttonhole thread itself.) to make it stick in the fabric better when I start off the thread.

I don’t tie it, I just do a couple of stabstitches or backstitches and it holds well. (I’m generally very thorough with tying off my threads when it comes to hand sewing, but a buttonhole is basically a long row of knots, so it’s pretty sturdy.)

Put the needle through underneath, with the tip coming up right along that little outline you sewed earlier. And I personally like to take the ends that are already in my hand and wrap them around the tip of the needle like so, but a lot of people loop the other end up around the other way, so here’s a link to a buttonhole video with that method. Try both and see which one you prefer, the resulting stitch is the same either way.

Sometimes I can pull the thread from the end near the needle and have the stitch look nice, but often I grab it closer to the base and give it a little wiggle to nestle it into place. This is more necessary with the cotton than it is with silk.

The knot should be on top of the cut edge of the fabric, not in front of it.

You can put your stitches further apart than I do if you want, they’ll still work if they’ve got little gaps in between them.

Keep going up that edge and when you get to the end you can either flip immediately to the other side and start back down again, or you can do a bar tack. (You can also fan out the stitches around the end if you want, but I don’t like to anymore because I think the rectangular ends look nicer, and the ends ought to be rectangular if you're going for an 18th century look.)

Here’s a bar tack vs. no bar tack sample. They make it look so nice and sharp, and they reinforce the ends.

For a bar tack do a few long stitches across the entire end.

And then do buttonhole stitches on top of those long stitches. I also like to snag a tiny bit of the fabric underneath, which is sometimes tricky to do if the fabric is lying flat, so I often fold it along the bar tack line.

Then stick the needle down into the fabric right where you ended that last stitch on the corner of the bar tack, so you don’t pull that corner out of shape, and then just go back to making buttonhole stitches down the other side.

Then do the second bar tack once you get back to the end.

To finish off my thread I make it sticky with a bit more beeswax, waxing it as close to the fabric as I can get, and then bring it through to the back and pull it underneath the stitches down one side and trim it off. Or maybe wax it after bringing it to the back, if it's silk and you're worried about getting wax marks on the front.

In my experience it stays put perfectly well this way without tying it off.

Hooray! Beautiful buttonholes! I suggest doing samples for practice before doing them on a garment.

Here are all the extant garments I showed in the video.

c. 1730's waistcoat, Cooper Hewitt collection.

c. 1760's coat, The Met.

Woman's jacket, late 18th century, The Met.

c. 1775-90 waistcoat, Cooper Hewitt collection.

c. 1740 breeches, The Met.

c. 1785-1800 breeches, The Met.
(They do have bar tacks, they're just very small.)

c. 1720's coat, The Met.

To my great shame, I forgot to label the top buttonhole on the centre front as functional when I included this image in the video.

c. 1755-65 coat, V&A.

c. 1760 woman's riding coat, The Met.

Late 18th century coat, The Met.

c. 1770-90 waistcoat, The Met.

And the inside facing.

c. 1770's waistcoat (part of a formal suit.)
Royal Ontario Museum.

And some which I didn't include in the video.

Here's one of the only photos I've seen of the pieced lining method. (The other 3 are in the book Waistcoats: From the Hopkins Collection.) I'm sure there are plenty more garments with this lining method out there, it's just that we almost never get photos of the insides.

Waistcoat fronts, c. 1726-35, National Trust.
Not a very high resolution photo, but you can just barely see the piecing & little flap.

And the one example I've seen of bound buttonholes on an 18th century coat.

c. 1780's. Sold on ebay.

It looks to me like they cut the holes and bound them with strips of fabric, like the edges of stays, but I haven't tried a sample of this yet.

Bound buttonholes appear to have been pretty common on leather breeches, but these ones look different from the ones on the coat - like they sewed a little scrap to the outside in a rectangle, then cut the hole in the middle of the rectangle of stitching and turned the scrap to the inside and sewed it down.