Tag: buttonholes

Simple Shirts

I’ve been looking for “interesting” shirt patterns, thinking that I could make lots of plain white shirts with fancy details, and then dress them up with jewellery or waistcoats or (cool) bow ties. The pictures above are about half-and-half patterns that I own already, and ones I’d like to buy.

Except that I’ve bought dozens of patterns for perfectly lovely shirts over the years, and then never made any because my sewing machine hates making buttonholes. I’ve had it looked at, but it works perfectly for Sue at the sewing machine shop. Every time. Stupid thing.

I’ve made precisely four of the shirt patterns that I own, and that includes a pirate shirt and an original 1970s pattern. I altered every single one of them to either replace the buttons with poppers, or to leave the buttons off altogether, but I don’t want to do that with everything I make!

Then there’s the part where I actually own quite a number of shirts already, and I never wear them. They’re always at the bottom of the wardrobe in the ironing pile, so I tend to just throw on a t-shirt instead.

Clearly someone needs to invent a magical button-free, crease-free shirt.

Oh, wait.

That’s a t-shirt.

Ah.

Buttonholes

I haven’t been showing you very many of my wedding plans on here, but this is a little something I thought other people might be interested in. They’re not quite finished yet, but these are the basis of the buttonholes that our families and Best Man are going to wear on the day. The pink and purple ones are for the men, and the cream and peach are for the ladies.

All of the flowers came from Hobby Craft. The roses are paper, with wire stems. The fabric violets came as part of a big posy which I dismantled. I’ll be using the large leaves from the posy to go behind each of the buttonholes. The silver and gold holders are actually filigree aglets for corset laces, bought from Vena Cava.

The large leaves are currently being pressed underneath a pile of books, waiting for the glue to dry. I’ve attached a magnet to the back of each large leaf, and glued on a smaller leaf to cover it. That way there’s no need for pins – the back of the magnet simply goes underneath a lapel or inside a dress, and holds the buttonhole into place.

Once the glue is dry, the leaves will be held very simply by twisting around the wire stems from the flowers. Then I can trim the stems, crimp the top of the aglets, and they’re done!