Sewing Tips: Marking Button Holes

Video Transcript

" Hello! I’m Stephany from Stephany’s Simply Sewing on behalf of expertvillage.com. We’ve got out shirt completed for the most part, and we’re down to having to put in our button holes and do our buttons. The question becomes: which side do I put buttonholes in? Well, we know that women are always right, and so the left or the right laps over the left in women, and in men it’s the left that laps over the right side. So we’re going to put our buttonholes in the left side of our garment. I know this is my left side because I did put a pocket only on the left side. Now, my pattern that I chose to use does come with a buttonhole guide. What I’m going to do is go ahead….and it says top…so I’m going to put my top at the top and secure it with a pin. I want to match the edge of my buttonholed guide with the edge of my lap and secure it with a couple of pins. Once I’ve done that, I’m going to go ahead and take my marking pen—this is a dissolvable; it erases with water—that we’ve used before to mark our garment, and I notice where my buttonhole is on the pattern. I like to just simply turn this up, make a dot, turn it up again, make a dot, and then just simple connect the dots. That’s how I will know where that button goes. Then simply pulling this up to the next buttonhole, dot, the end of the buttonhole, dot, connect your dots. I’m going to go ahead and do that. This shirt does have 8 buttonholes on the front placket, so I’m going to go ahead and finish marking my shirt in this manner all the way up. In this way you know exactly where you need to sew for your shirt. Do make sure that you’ve lined yours up and stop and double check, because we really didn’t pin this down very well or very securely because we do want to be able to move this as we go. If you notice, my finger on this side has maintained pressure on my paper so that I know that it’s creeping. I’ll go ahead and finish this, but this is one way to mark your buttonholes on your button garment. "