The art of sewing on buttons

Therese de Dillmont’s beautiful illustrations on the art of sewing on buttons.

Try to chat to a non-seamstress about sewing and the chances are she’ll (or he’ll, or they’ll) wave her hands in the wailing “but I can’t even sew on a button” to demonstrate their complete unsuitability for this sort of conversation. At which point I coax and cajole and try to explain what fun stitching is (blah, blah etc). I mean – sewing on a button!? – how hard can it be? Well, it seems that it can actually be very hard, and is not simply a matter of a few scruffy stitches with whatever thread and button come to hand.

A few weeks ago I downloaded – free with illustration plates too 🙂 – Therese de Dillmont’s Encyclopedia of Needlework from Project Gutenberg and I typically skipped the ‘Plain sewing’ section to indulge in all sorts of other long-lost stitching delights. But then today, when browsing through again, I hopped along to page 12 ‘Sewing on buttons’, just to take a look. True to all her other instructions she shows the art of careful, practical stitching skills.

And this got me thinking about the times before zips, popper, and lycra leggings, when the role of the humble button was oh-so-much-more vital in keeping us cosy and decently covered, and it was a jolly good idea to know how to sew on a button securely.

Just in case anyone else was curious, zips were first patented by Elias Howe, 1851, in America (thanks Wikipedia), and poppers (snap fasteners) by Heribert Bauer 1885 in Germany, but both methods took many more decades before they became commonplace fasteners on clothing.