Button, button, who's got the button?

Yesterday was New Years day. With the new year arrived an opportunity to learn a new skill.

After three days of working on this sewing project, all that remained was the buttonholes and a couple of buttons.

In a brief moment of detraction, instead of cutting between the buttonhole stitches, I also cut through the stitches that the machine so carefully placed to prevent the fabric from unravelling.

I was devastated. I had never done this before and had absolutely no idea how to fix it.

After I walked away, drake some coffee, and consulted the interweb (who wasn't as helpful as I had hoped, but my sewing book is currently in storage, so oh well), I sat down and taught myself to hand sew a button hole.

Hand sewing a button hole involves picking out the machine stitches, something I've never been very good at...

And then waxing some thread, and using it to sew around the slit in the fabric.

So I'm chuffed at learning a new skill, but it just reflects how little I know about this sewing thing.

Basically I'm a self taught sewer. I have one of those Reader's Digest sewing books (somewhere) but it never really spoke my language. What I tend to do, is buy a pattern, some fabric, thread, &c., and then do my best to follow the pictures. More an IKEA style of assembly rather than actual sewing.

While it is satisfying to make the clothing, it would be even more satisfying to understand what I'm doing.

What I would really like is for someone to sit down with me over the course of a few weeks, and working with my own measurements, help create some basic patterns (skirt, shirt, &c) and teach me how I can modify these patterns to accommodate things like fashion, different fabrics and size change.

Just being able to understand how and why we do these different things in sewing - how this two dimensional fabric suddenly becomes three dimensional clothing - that would be a start.