Horizontal vs Vertical Buttonholes

When do you use horizontal versus vertical buttonholes? Let me explain. I'm Susie Fur. Horizontal button holes tend to be more stable after three quarters of an inch, vertical, buttonholes are limited to a length of up to three quarters of an inch. This right here is a vertical buttonhole. This here is a horizontal buttonhole. Go through your closet. Look at your, at the shirts in there and where buttons are applied. Look at those buttonholes and see whether they're horizontal or vertical. There's a lot of thought that goes into it up to three quarters of an inch. You can use a horizontal or a vertical buttonhole over three quarters of an inch. You're gonna want to use a horizontal button hole. The reason it's more stable vertical buttonholes when you're putting a, a button in a vertical button hole, that button can slide up and down a little bit. So if your button hole is bigger than three quarters of an inch, it's going to, it could make the top of your shirt uneven because that button can slide up. There's too much play, there's too much room for it to move. Same thing that button at the bottom, it could shift that, that base. So it's not even, it's shifted a little bit. So you, you want to pay attention to the stability of the button hole. Ok. Vertical buttonholes are going to max at three quarters of an inch because of that play. They also tend to gape a little bit more vertical buttonholes. All of that thread can make it weighted down a little bit. So instead of that vertical buttonhole sitting cleanly like this, it might start to droop a little with the weight of the thread. So that's the reason vertical buttonholes max at three quarters of an inch. Now, looking at this shirt, this is interesting. We have vertical buttonholes here and most button down or button up shirts have vertical button holes. So the difference between a button down and a button up, a button down shirt has the collar button down like this shirt right here. Ok. A button up shirt doesn't have the buttons on the collar. Here. We have your vertical button holes. And then down here, you can see we have a horizontal buttonhole that's helpful in keeping the that level um of the base. There's no room for that buttonhole to slide around, making the base not level same up here. There's a horizontal button hole in the collar band which also helps that collar stay level because there's no room for that button play. Ok. So it's not unusual to find a combination of both vertical and horizontal button holes in a garment, uh, especially in a button down shirt. And here we have more of a vertical button hole to keep the, the collar button down. All right, if I need a buttonhole bigger than say, an inch and a half an inch and 38, I tend to go to a bound button hole. A bound button hole is a fabric button hole. As you can see, here's a little sample of a fabric buttonhole. I tend to go to a bound button hole when I need something bigger than one in three eights, 1.5 because taking such a big cut in the fabric and having a vertical or horizontal button hole, it just, it makes it weakens the fabric too much. It's such a big cut. So I tend to go with fabric buttonholes. If I need a button hole over say one and three eights, one and 1.5 to summarize, I'm going to use a horizontal or vertical buttonhole up to three quarters of an inch. But remember those vertical buttonholes max out at three quarters. And then I'm going to use a horizontal buttonhole up to say one and a quarter one and three eights and beyond, I tend to move toward that fabric buttonhole, that bound buttonhole. So those are the guidelines to follow when considering buttonholes on your sewn garments