Today's quick tip is about buttonholes! If you've ever made and buttonhole and it didn't turn out quite as nice as you would like, there's an easy fix! Use a scrap of stabilizer behind your fabric while sewing your buttonholes. I think tear away stabilizer works just fine for this. If working with a knit fabric, experiment with using tear away as well as cut away stabilizer.
Believe it or not these 2 buttonhole were created with the sewing machine set to the same size. You can see on the left buttonhole, there is quite a bit of puckering happening all around the buttonhole. You can also tell that the stitches are pulling so much that they are appearing more narrow and creating a channeling effect under the stitches. The right buttonhole is laying perfectly flat, has nice wide stitches, and an opening in the center large enough to cut.
Here is the back side of the buttonholes. Now I did use a contrasting bobbin thread, but you can see it's the same story on the underside. If you compare the above picture with this one, you'll notice that the right side (the one using stabilizer) has balanced stitches between top and bottom. What I mean by this is the density of stitches is about the same on both sides, whereas the left buttonhole is dense on top and sparse on the underside.
