buttons!

Wren demonstrates her new fascination with buttons on the sewing room sill.

My younger sister, Julie, has a strange, inexplicable life-long aversion to buttons.  She thinks they're gross.  As kids we used to raid my mom's sewing room for novel art supplies and scissors and glue guns.  I personally loved the antique tin filled with miscellaneous buttons: letting them run through my fingers like sand, organizing them into little piles and picking my favorites.  Julie would shriek and call me disgusting and leave the room.  She still barely will touch, wear or tolerate buttons in any form.

My little sister and her little guy.  How sweet!

I'm finding that I have a similar reaction these days, not to buttons, but to sewing buttonholes.  Ewwww.  Oh man, I have read site after site with information about doing buttonholes with a machine.  I have been through nearly all the Youtube tutorials on the subject.  I have the entire sewing-buttonholes-with-your-machine section of my sewing machine manual memorized.  And I have yet to craft a buttonhole that doesn't make me cringe.  They're functional, but they're decidedly not pretty.  Maybe it's my machine?  Regardless, it's frustrating and a bit disheartening.

I'm not giving up on the task completely, but I'm not gonna lie- there is much rejoicing when I can avoid it.  And that's exactly what I did when I sewed this little sundress for Wren by re-purposing a women's button-down top from the thrift store.

I just took all of those beautiful, perfect, straight button holes and flipped them around from the front of the shirt to the back of this dress.  It's a technique I've seen many others use when working with buttoned shirts, and I think it's a dream come true.

I used some pattern pieces from another old pattern (McCall's 3531) to get the sizing right.  Then I added a lining to the bodice to give it a more finished look, though I had to fudge it a little bit around that glorious strip of buttons.

I'd originally planned to alter this shirt into a maternity top for myself, but I have to say that I'm totally happy to have forewent that plan in favor of a summer dress for the wee one.  It's actually a size or so too big (I used clothes pins to gather at the back for these photos), so I think she'll get plenty of wear out of it.

And I suppose for the sake of my button-loathing little sister I won't be making a matching one for Wren's cousin.