Blue Dress Progress

Now that I have all the parts, I tried out my buttonhole attachment. It took me 20 minutes of bumbling to get it attached correctly, and then I busted out a perfect button hole in 10 seconds! Awesome! Why was I ever afraid of making these??????

Here is my menacing attachment. I love how shiny and black and cool looking it all is.

(I was just talking to my sewing machine telling it how pretty it is with its shiny blackness and fancy gold writing. Don't worry, I talk to the car and the dog too, comparing them to other cars/dogs and giving them compliments.)

Tonight I fit the skirt of my dress, because I didn't need any help pinning the back, unlike the bodice. It fit pretty well, but I lengthened all the darts about 2-3 inches. It had a weird poofiness between my waist and hips, and that fixed it. I also interfaced and made the belt. Since self-covered belt buckle kits are obnoxiously hard to find and don't meet my standards of "cheap", I decided it will just button. Which was an excuse to figure out this contraption.

My beautiful belt (don't look at the inside) and my perfect trial button hole.

This is my next project, which I blame entirely on Gertie's blog. She had a post about the necessity of owning a perfect blouse that buttons up the back. Thus, I HAD to buy one on ebay. It was preordained, meant to be, karmic. lol, excuses, excuses.

Isn't it cute?

Does anyone else have a Singer buttonholer and thinks it's awesome?

or

uses advice on other blogs to make impulse buys?

In Progress

This is halfway done on my dress. I think I did a nice job on the sleeves and finally found a gathering technique for set-in sleeves that might work for me.

I bought this book at a garage sale a long time ago, and it is full of good explanations. It is from 1967.

It has lots of funny illustrations.

Then I decided to dig through my drawer of attachments for my machine. My machine is a 15 series from 1952, and although I got it for free from a nice woman on freecycle.org, it came with lots of the original equipment. Manual, oil, feet for different things. I started looking for a zipper foot, and I have 2. Then I started looking at the menacing buttonholer.

It has all of the gear, including manual, 2 sets of guides for sizes- everything you need except....

the feed plate cover that stops the machine from moving the fabric.

Wahhhh.

So, I wasted a great deal of time online. In the end, it looks like I would have to buy the whole buttonholer set on ebay for 15-20 bucks, just to get that one stupid part.

I don't know what I will do yet. I do think that if I am going to say that I "sew," if only for fun, I need to learn how to make a buttonhole at some point....