Buttonholes......

I FINALLY got a decent practice buttonhole. I'm not going to lie, there was swearing involved. See all those one-legged buttonholes. That's where the machine would make the left leg, but jam up when it was time to come down to make the right leg. It only took me SIX tries to get that one buttonhole (the one you can't see because the button is in it)!

I have to admit, I was wishing I had my old sewing machine. BUT. The whole reason we bought New & Shiny was because the buttonholer on that machine had seized up and was non-functioning. It took me a while, but I did (FINALLY) figure out what was going wrong.

There is a lever you must pull down to engage the buttonholer. The foot bumps into the lever and lets the buttonholer know it's time to go back and complete the buttonhole. I had that lever pulled down. Apparently, not ALL THE WAY down. Because, once I corrected that, I got a perfect buttonhole! Still on a learning curve with this machine......

I was able to complete the five buttonholes on hubby's vest. Although, it didn't really go as planned. The second buttonhole is when I found the buttonholer was bumping up against the bulk of the welted pocket and thought it should be starting back WAY before it should. MORE swearing. I switched to a classic 4-step buttonhole that let me manually set the length of the buttonhole. After the first buttonhole was sewn, the machine remembers the settings of the buttonhole and sews the rest with those settings (how does it do that?). So, the vest is now complete with buttonholes. Just need to sew on buttons and do a bit of pressing and the vest will be DONE!

I'm ready for something easy now......This weekend, I'm going to cut out some t-shirts and do some Sewing with Knits! If you've been reading along with The Seasoned Homemaker's Sewing with Knits series, you might have read where she uses a walking foot for some of her seams. I have a walking foot for this new machine, so, I think I will try that. We'll see how that goes!

Happy Sewing!

Lori