At 10:41 PM 1/11/06 -0500, Tamara P Duvall wrote:
> What's the difference between a
> "blanket" stitch and a "buttonhole" one? Nancy Evans (Needle Lace With
> Nancy), on p 11, says:
> "[...] begin blanket (often wrongly called buttonhole) stitching
> tightly [...]"
The "often wrongly called" is your clue: certain embroiders want to use
"blanket stitch" for all forms of buttonhole, in order to reserve "buttonhole"
for what we've always called "tailor's buttonhole" (buttonhole stitch with an
extra twist, suitable for buttonholes on heavy fabrics such as coating.)
They aren't getting very far -- partly because of the tremendous inertia of
bushels of reference materials that use the older terms, and partly -- I
suspect -- because "blanket stitch" sounds as though it ought to be coarse
enough to work on the edge of a blanket, and sounds funny as a description of
buttonholing.
It's more plausible to refer to blanket stitch as "Spaced Buttonhole" than to
call buttonhole a closely-worked blanket stitch. Enthoven (The Stitches of
Creative Embroidery) refers to "Spaced buttonhole, also known as blanket
stitch", and doesn't, as near as I can tell without re-reading the whole book,
mention tailor's buttonhole at all. Mary Thomas's Dictionary of Embroidery
Stitches describes tailor's buttonhole in great detail, then ends cryptically
"When used for actual buttonholes on tailor-made garments, the process of
working is reversed." without saying *what* is reversed. I suppose she was
only heading off those who would be confused by a different description in a
tailoring book; teaching the making of buttonholes is outside the scope of a
dictionary of embroidery stitches. She does strongly imply that tailor's
buttonhole can, or should, be worked only on edges.
(We just hashed this out on 18th-Century Woman, if you're wondering why I had
references at my fingertips.)
--
Joy Beeson
http://home.earthlink.net/~joybeeson/
http://home.earthlink.net/~dbeeson594/ROUGHSEW/ROUGH.HTM
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where it's sunny and the high is FIFTY-THREE F!
(It's *supposed* to be bitter cold in January.)
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