I have a favourite cardigan with very worn buttonholes. The yarn around the buttonholes was worn all the way through and the knitted fabric was starting to unravel completely.

I don’t enjoy sewing buttonholes. It’s fiddly and tedious.

One of my mending books spends several pages on a technique for mending buttonholes with a small patch of fabric. It looks clever and tidy and sturdy:

Despite the illustrations, I couldn’t quite wrap my head around how it actually works. Topologically it just does not make sense. You cannot take a rectangular, flat piece of fabric and fold it inside out through a slit, and have all of it still lay flat.

I tried it out anyway, assuming it would make sense when I held it all in my hands. Maybe the fabric would somehow settle into tidy folds. Nope. Not even near. No matter how much I tried to smooth it and flatten it and gather it into pleats, it just bunched up and pulled on itself. I couldn’t even get it flat enough to sew the edges down. Completely hopeless.

So it’ll have to be the old school way after all. I reinforced the button band with a strip of fabric that I sewed onto the rear of it, and now I’m sewing the buttonhole edges one at a time. The front looks pretty good but the reverse, not so much. Luckily nobody will be looking at that side. Also luckily I don’t have to finish all the buttonholes before I can wear the cardigan again. They’re boring, so I’m doing them one at a time. Four done, which is enough to make it usable.