17-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today:
Friday, August 9, 1912: We had sort of s sewing bee here today.
Besse was out and brought some of her stuff along. Her middle-
aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later: Besse was
Grandma’s oldest sister. She was married and lived in nearby
Watsontown. Was Grandma’s mother making buttonholes during the
sewing bee? Three days prior to this post, Grandma wrote that
her mother was making her a dress for school, and I posted
hundred-year-old drawings of dresses with lots of buttons.
Several readers commented that it would have been difficult to
make a dress with that many buttonholes. One reader noted that
people didn’t need to make buttonholes by hand a hundred years
ago because treadle sewing machines had an attachment that made
them. But, in case, if you ever want to make them by hand, here
are the directions from a hundred-year-old book: A well-made
garment that is otherwise perfect may be greatly injured in
appearance by badly made buttonholes.