Chanel Jacket tutorial 4 - buttonholes

A good way to tell a real Chanel jacket from a knock off is to look at the buttonholes. Chanel jackets have embroidered buttonholes on the fashion fabric and bound buttonholes on the lining. This is very time consuming (and expensive) to do but creates a neat and durable buttonhole. Embroidered and bound buttonholes can be used on a variety of garments, so these techniques are well worth learning even if you never make a Chanel style jacket.
I have re-done an example buttonhole because it was very difficult to see the detail on the fabric I used for my jacket. I have used a fairly loosely woven wool. The first step is to mark your buttonholes - I have used chalk for convenience but I really recommend thread tracing them on your jacket. If you are confident of fit, it is a lot easier to do the buttonholes before attaching the centre fronts, but I like to do them on the almost finished garment so I can make sure I have a buttonhole right on the bustline (which helps prevent gaping)

Bound buttonholes are usually used on fashion fabric, so they are seen from the right side. They can be used on any garment where a lining or facing will hide the back of the buttonhole. On a Chanel jacket, it is the lining that has the bound buttonhole, and the wrong side of the buttonhole is hidden by the fashion fabric. You make a bound buttonhole with a patch of fabric. This can be straight grain or cut on the bias. Baste this to the right side (by which I mean the side that will be visible when the garment is finished)

Then carefully machine stitch approx 3mm (1/8") on each side of the marked buttonhole line. Do not add 3mm to the ends. It's best to start and finish somewhere in the middle of one of the long edges, where there will be less strain on the buttonhole.

Get your sharpest embroidery scissors and carefully cut along the marked buttonhole line - stopping about 5mm (1/4") from the ends. Then cut the to the corners of the rectangle you sewed

Push the patch through to the wrong side

Now the tricky part, you want to press your buttonhole so that the patch is wrapped around the "seam allowance" from the step where you sewed the rectangle. From the front it should look like two little lips that meet in the middle of the buttonhole

And from the back it should look like this

At each side there will be the triangle you cut at the end of the buttonhole, and the excess patch

Carefully machine sew the triangle to the patch

If you were using this buttonhole normally, you would stabstitch around the rectangle, and then slash the lining/facing behind it and carefully fellstitch the lining/facing to the buttonhole. But there's no need to do either of those things for the Chanel jacket.
Your next step is the embroidered buttonhole on the fashion fabric. This has fewer steps, but is, in my opinion, more fiddly. I have used contract thread so you can see what I've done, but using matching thread (and lining) are going to give a much better finished look. Embroidered buttonholes can be used on most fabrics and give a much neater and more durable finish than a machine buttonhole.
You start by machine stitching around the buttonhole line. Ideally this should be about 2 - 3mm from the line.

Carefully cut along the buttonhole line

This is the bit where the instruction is simple but the reality is difficult. Simply buttonhole stitch around the edges! Use a single thread of buttonhole silk - wax the thread with beeswax to prevent tangles and add strength (pull the thread through beeswax then press with a hot iron). You do not want to run out of thread halfway through. A handy guide is 1 yard of thread = 1 inch of buttonhole - it is worth using inches just for once to use this rule!

There's not much more instruction to give other than do it slowly and neatly. It really is worth practising a couple of times on scraps of your fabric. I find that when the stitch is pulled tight it helps to use my finger and thumb to just ease the purl/knot of the buttonhole stitch to sit on the top of the slash in the fabric.
When you get to the ends, you can make a few stitches across for strength

Go all the way around the buttonhole. As you can see,some threads still stick out. It is worth experimenting on scrap fabric to see how close to put the stitched

Baste the fashion fabric and lining wrong sides together then stabstitch along the rectangle of the bound buttonhole

You can see that the finished buttonhole would look considerably tidier if thread and lining matched fabric. If you want to have a contrast lining, consider making at least the patches of your bound buttonholes match the fashion fabric for a neater look.