I turned up to a "Buttons and Eyelets" class, only to discover it was at the end of a series all about garb construction.  So I’ll share the handouts here with you, and show you what I did with buttons and eyelets.

That’s the button – it’s completely fabric!  Isn’t that neat?  So I can embroider whatever I want on my buttons, and make them small if I like, etc.  The eyelets are done by poking a sharpened stick (an awl) between the threads and redistributing them to make the hole, then fixing the hole’s size by doing blanket stitch backwards.  Then you do blanket stitch with the edge thread running around the hole’s edge, to reinforce the edge.  And that’s it!  Button holes are the same, just snip a few threads of the warp.

Our teacher said that buttons were typically located right on the edge of the fabric, in the selvedge, and that buttonholes were moved back – which is converse to the way we do things now.  I think the period way would look nicer if you were getting fat for your cotehardie – the gapping would be concealed behind the buttonhole placket.

Here’s the handouts – they’re big image files.  Download Text.jpg
, Download Measurements.jpg
, Download Cutting.jpg
, Download Seams.jpg
, Download Trims.jpg

See how the seams go up into
the armseye?  That’s like Lavena’s daughter’s cote, the black one that everyone admired me in so much.  I’ve copied the pattern for some future going-back-in-timeness, since it’s really too early for Greet.