 We are more than halfway through so a new look 6651 together if you've missed any of the videos in this sew-along They are all in the description box. I've also been adding them to my sew-alongs playlist So if you want to check that out, you can do that as well You'll learn stuff like this dress as well got a lot of sew-alongs in that playlist today We are going to be working Exclusively on buttons and buttonholes. I know that there are some people who were just like oh I really hate but making buttonholes on my sewing machine. Some people say I I can't I can't ever get my machine to do it Right. I don't know what I'm doing wrong So I've got a lot of tips a lot of tricks for you on working on them on the machine And also getting really good placement of those buttons. So let's jump right into it Let's head to the cutting table I'll walk you through making all of those buttonholes and we will also get the buttons attached as well if you just absolutely Will not do buttons got to cover two stay tuned till the end or I have some alternate options for you there as well Okay, so first things first our very first step of the placket For the buttonhole section. This is all step 22 one step in the instructions And I'm going to break it down into a bunch of little steps But they want us to come in here and stitch in the ditch Stitch in the ditch is where you literally drop your needle in the groove of this seam right here And you are catching the underside. So if I'm feeling My fabric this is where the placket ends on the inside and this is where stitch in the ditches And my basting stitches are holding all of that in place And we are going to stitch in the ditch the length of the placket There is one little tool that I like to help with stitch in the ditch and that is this foot here It's your blind hem foot and you can see on the back side. There is this little or I guess the underside there's this little metal Uh, I don't know groovy thing And the groovy thing if you place that into Where you want your stitch to go you can see that there is a little here Let me get something to point with you can see that there is a little itty-bitty indentation in the groovy things Thing in the groovy thing itself There's a little indentation if you drop your needle right into that Then your needle is in line with the groovy thing And then you can place the groovy thing such a technical term Into the groove of the garment and it will slide right along Inside the ditch of your fabric and that needle is dropping at the same place right in the ditch every single time So if you're not super accurate with your machine and your needle grab your blind hem foot This will be a huge huge help for you So i'm going to go stitch in the ditch both plackets So now that i'm done with that i can kind of show you What the results are so we've just stitch in the ditch and from the right side You shouldn't be able to see it at all and from the wrong side You can see we have a pretty even stitch going all the way down We can also take our seam ripper and start removing some of those basting stitches and because we did such a long basting stitch it should kind of just pull right out like this um And you should be able to get it out pretty easily maybe break every I don't know fifth one or something that might make it a little bit easier But go ahead and remove all of those basting stitches and then your placket is fully prepared for our Um for our buttonholes. All right, so all the basting stitches have been removed Our placket is fully tacked down using the stitch in the ditch method so beautiful Okay, so now we are going to install our Button holes the button holes go on the right hand side of the garment So If i'm wearing this and you can see my neckline there like my head goes here my body goes here The right hand side of the garment is actually the left hand side of when you are Looking at the garment. So that would be this side here. Sorry. I just found another part of the basting stitch. I think um So it's the left hand side of the garment when you're looking at it Or the right hand side of the garment when you're wearing it and you can barely see I've kind of been You know manhandling this placket a little bit so you can barely see our Um markings, but I can see them and hopefully you can still see yours as well because that is what we are going to be Moving on to next putting the buttonholes in the right hand placket Right the wearer's right hand placket or when you're looking at it the left hand placket. Okay, so I have gone ahead did a little test on my buttonhole foot right here Okay, so this was the right side of my buttonhole foot. I tested out two different Buttonhole stitches one has like little crosses that go up and down and one is just like little parallel lines I just prefer the parallel line one especially for this linen fabric because it is so kind of not very loosely woven But it's a little bit loosely woven. So the more tightly we can pack in some stitches there I think the better will be for the butts to hold up I've also when I tested this put in a piece of interfacing as well. So it truly mimics What the construction of this placket is so my buttonhole foot worked perfectly and now I can also see kind of how big or how long The buttons are going to be because I put in the exact button that I was going to use for my dress as well so Now we can kind of fold this back and we can see okay That's about how big the buttonhole is going to be that looks about right You could even cut this open and put your button in there to see if that That it fits properly and then it goes through nice and easily you can do a lot of stuff once you test out your little buttonhole If you've never sewn a buttonhole before this is how you use the buttonhole foot that comes with your machine It has this little like Slighty thing in the back and that determines how long your buttonhole ends up being so you just put your button in Clamp it shut to where the button is like kind of stuck in there So now the machine knows that they need to make a buttonhole that is going to fit this Length and then it clips onto your machine right here There's a little lever on your machine that drops behind this guy here And then you set it to your buttonhole foot stitch The other thing is we're going to start sewing the buttonholes at the bottom and this is kind of one of those things where I just started doing over time because I got frustrated starting at the top Going to put in the button even though I've done my little test and it comes out perfect For some reason something goes awry and it's all messed up. Well now The first one the mess the messed up one is going to be on the bottom So if I have to pick it out at least it's the one on the bottom people will see it less It's like not right close up to my face. So that's my other tip for you for that And yeah, we're just going to get to the machine and Put in our buttonholes All right, you guys so we've made little cross marks, right? There is a vertical one That's five eighths of an inch from the folded edge of the placket And then there the horizontal ones that we measured with the little buttonhole gauge thing So on your buttonhole foot There are little lines green and red And this will be the horizontal line and this will be the vertical line You just want to make sure you get those matched up With the markings on your garment Which is why I also do nice big long ones too so I can make sure that they kind of like Go through like across the entire length of the buttonhole foot and you just Do your best to eyeball the horizontal line And then the vertical line i'm matching up with one of the marks on the edge of my or on the on my throat plate And where's the horse? There's the horizontal line. There's the vertical line. She looks pretty straight And drop your needle And when you drop your needle, this is a really good opportunity for you to see if it's going into your horizontal line And if it is and if it's really close then you are good to go And you just kind of I don't know say a little prayer or something, but it's going to be fine. It's going to be fine We did it. We have a beautiful buttonhole. So now just go to the other Nine of them because there are 10 buttonholes um when we get to the ones that are in the Elastic case that there's no elastic going through the placket. So it's not like you have to um Worry about the needle and all of that going through the elastic, but the elastic does end right about here So it is a little bit tough. So just Take your time on that one maybe paying back your speed a little bit And just make sure that you're giving the machine enough To be able to work through that area, but Other than that i'm going to make sure I have all my button all my For all my buttonholes i'm making sure the fold of the placket is in the same line on my throat plate And just dropping that needle Right into the horizontal line every time and they will be Nice and even We did it you guys all 10 buttonholes In yes, so that was pretty uneventful and in buttonhole land uneventful is great news Um, okay, so moving right along next steps. We are obviously going to be clipping all of our threads That are hanging out from our buttonholes So we're going to do that and then we're also going to do a little bit of a preventative kind of measure Because we are going to be cutting these open and there's going to be raw edges of fabric exposed We want to try and control that as best we can. So there is a product called fray block I think I of course don't have any right now because I didn't think to check So i'm going to you just use fray check, but if you can find fray block That's even better. So the buttonholes are not cut open. All right, we are going to take our fray check Has a nice point on the top and we are just going to apply a little bit So it's like a liquidy type of thing. You just want to apply a little bead Inside these stitching on All of your buttonholes And we are going to give this some time to Saturate into the fabric and kind of adhere itself to those fibers So that when we cut them open The fray check is already kind of like In there doing its thing I'm not going to let it dry completely, but we are going to Just make sure that it's you know in there and saturate it. All right Once that has kind of done its thing for a couple of minutes. We're going to come in here We're going to use a button hole cutter Now this is a button hole cutter as you can see the tip of it is very very sharp Very sharp. Um, this one's by clover. Um, I think every brand probably has theirs But this one by clover is really nice It's a 12 millimeter meaning the depth here is 12 millimeters Which is nice for five eighths inch button holes Um, you don't want to get one that's too big because then you can't use them in smaller button holes I'd rather have a smaller one that I could just do a couple passes with Rather than a big one that I can only use a little bit of and some of them also come with like a little protector wood thingy Um, I had one and can't find it now. This is the lid of like a candle thing I don't know you can use whatever you want if you're worried about your surface, but You basically just take your button hole cutter You carefully place it in between All of your stitching and you want to make sure that you're placing it in between the the Horizontal stitches that are here, but also, you know, the vertical ones as well You don't want to clip any threads at all. So just make sure you have it in there Nestled in between all the threads and then just give it a good press It doesn't take much pressure at all And we now have a beautiful button hole If you want to give this one more pass with the fray check do it from the wrong side And just make sure that you get everything Um, nice and saturated with the fray check product so that your Um Your buttonholes don't fray. All right I'm gonna do the rest of mine. Okay Buttonholes are done And I wanted you guys to get through or to at least watch the buttonhole process before I told you your alternatives For buttons I wanted you to kind of gain a little bit of confidence by seeing me do it And maybe that would give you the confidence to try it But obviously if you don't have a buttonhole cutter, you can put pins at the top Of your buttonhole then take a very sharp maybe brand new seam ripper Put it through the bottom and then zip it up like this and the pin is going to prevent it from Shooting through and cutting through your horizontal. Okay, so that's if you don't have that if you Just don't want to do buttonholes at all For whatever reason, maybe you don't like the way they look or I don't know you can do snaps You can do purl snaps. You can do metallic snaps I would just make sure that they are still size appropriate And you don't need like the heavy duty heavy duty snaps that come in the package I would go on somewhere like etsy or waywack or somewhere like that and get some of their appropriate weight for Kind of like a lightweight summer dress um, you could even do cam snaps Which are the little plastic ones that you see in baby onesies a lot because this is such a lightweight dress because it's kind of summery and You know, maybe you don't need metal or pearl or any of that kind of fancy stuff You could just do plastic so long as it matched your fabric and kind of with the aesthetic that you're going for Um, I think the cam snaps would work really well to again Just try and make sure you get all of those whether it's regular snaps pearl cam whatever it is close to the five eighth um inch That they are recommending because that is like the right proportion for this placket and everything else um But yeah, you can totally do snaps my other thing about this placket is that you could Just do if you're like, okay. I've only got five buttons in my soul So you could do five buttons through here leave From here down You could do faux buttons where you just you stitch this closed And you just sew on the buttons themselves and no button holes if you wanted to do something like that You could do that with this kind of dress as well because you just pull this elastic over your hips and you are good to go Okay, that's everything I have to say about button holes. I do hope you guys give them a try Don't be afraid. You know, we're humans. We're better than any Anything we're we're better than buttons buttons will not take us down Okay, so now we are going to put on our buttons and you remember we marked our hole or our Markings our button markings on both sides of our placket But I just want to be doubly doubly sure That especially at the only place on this dress that is fitted is here If this were like a fit and flare dress and it were fitted up top here, too I'd probably do this everywhere But I just want to make sure that we are on the mark at this fitted part because that is where it is going to get the most strain Um, so I want to match up the folds of our plackets And I want to match up through the Uh horizontal lines as well take a marking tool I just get in there and make a few passes like so just enough for it to pass through so you can make sure Okay, yeah, I'm right online with where I need to be so Now we are going to sew buttons now We can do buttons on the machine. I Personally don't have a lot of success with the buttons on the machine It ends up getting really nasty underneath Um, and honestly ends up being a little bit more trouble than it's worth And ever since I got my thimble from thimbles for you that fits my finger. It's comfortable. It stays on Um, I've been a lot less averse to hand sewing. So I'm actually going to sew on by hand all of my buttons Um, I'm going to you know sew them all by hand But if you want you can go to your machine and do them too. Your machine definitely has a function for buttonholes I I just don't love the way that it looks so i'm going to go put on a couple episodes of friends And put on my buttons and I will meet you guys back here tomorrow where we start putting on the collar And these are our last few steps so exciting Sigh a deep breath, right relief You've got 10 buttonholes 10 button sewn you can close up your garment now And all we have left to do is work on the collar possibly the most It's not difficult. It's just you have to be pretty precise with this I've got lots of information for you coming tomorrow on the collar. So Meet you back here or sew along new look 6651