buttonhole relevation

Oh, the joy and convenience of the one-step, push a button and watch it go, buttonhole function! My sewing projects are not buttonhole intensive, but when I've got one (or several) to do, I love that the machine does all the work for me, so almost-automatically.

My practice pair of jeans are this close to done. They still need to be hemmed. And they still need a buttonhole.

The test buttonhole was perfect (and so easy!), but when I set up to do the one on the waistband there was a snag. Literally. The back of the buttonhole foot -- which on my machine sticks out quite a way -- got hung up on the finished belt loop above the pocket, all forward motion of fabric under the needle ceased (just too much going on to fit under the b'hole foot, in spite of vigorous tugging and vocal encouragement from the machine operator) and I had to abort the mission.

Too bad I followed the Jalie assembly instructions so slavishly and slowly, making sure I'd completed each step before moving on to the next. If I'd left the beltloops unfinished (i.e., dangling from the bottom of the waistband, and not yet folded up and stitched into place), doing a keyhole buttonhole by machine woulda been a piece of cake.

Now I have to do the buttonhole by hand (snort: not hardly likely!). Or rip out a double row of tiny, narrow, zig-zag topstitching on the belt loop to make room for the machine to do its thing, and then redo it. Or make a plain buttonhole backwards -- with that pesky belt-loop in front of the presser foot during construction, instead of behind it --but I prefer a keyhole style for a shank button and am not quite ready to give up on it.

Any decision on how to proceed has been tabled until after lunch. My creative ingenuity, decision-making skills, and tolerance for fiddly little details all plummet when I'm hungry.

In the meantime, I've written a large correction to the instructions for next time: "Do the buttonhole BEFORE sewing that last belt loop into place!"

It's very possible that some helpful reviewer (or many of them) posted a comment about this somewhere on the several PR jeans threads or in the 71 Jalie 2908 reviews, but you could make several pairs of jeans in the time it would take to read through all of that info, so I've done no more than glance at it.

I've got a muslin of Butterick 5238 (knit top) ready to go, so I might take a break from the jeans and work on that this afternoon.

********
2PM update: the buttonhole is done. With 10 styles to choose from, I found one that is reinforced at the back, then sewed it in reversed position, so the reinforcement is at the zip end. Problem solved.