The Best Buttonholes in Edinburgh

Detail of a hand-made cotton underskirt/petticoat, 1910s-1920s 

My grandmother made the best buttonholes in Edinburgh. She said so herself, but she wasn’t the only one: Everyone else said so too. She had a Singer sewing machine (still in my Aunt Mary’s living room) for straight seams, but the buttonholes were made by hand. The inner end of the hole, the part the button rubs against, is slightly rounded so it can withstand more wear. The edges of the buttonhole are reinforced and beautified by, of course, buttonhole stitch. 

Sabina Cameron, my grandmother, was the seventh of eight children (“Seventh child of a seventh child,” she would say). Her father died when she was three years old, in 1891, and his widow had to take in laundry to make ends meet. The boys went to a school for fatherless boys, but these did not exist for girls, so my grandmother had to leave school at the age of 14, and start working in a dressmaker’s shop. The work must have paid a single girl well enough, because within a decade beautiful postcards with her photograph began to appear, showing her with elegantly coiffed long hair and wonderful dresses that she must have made herself. 

She met my grandfather in 1916 at a dance in Edinburgh Castle, and they married in 1918, at the end of WWI; he had served in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. In their engagement photograph he is staunch and upright in his kilt, wearing puttees, while she sits almost hunched and crooked, like a bit of a siren: the Protestant girl who would convert to Catholicism to marry him.  

After they married, the couple moved to London and then Yorkshire, where my grandfather taught mathematics. Before they started a family—late in life, for those days—he would ride around on his motorcycle and she would ride in the sidecar. This is when I imagine she made this wonderful underskirt for herself: the waist measures about 26 inches, and the drawstring through a pleated section can make it even tighter. Their first child wasn’t born until they were 37, so she could have worn this slender garment for years, but it is so well preserved that it might have been worn only a few times. It shows signs of age but not of wear. 

No one in my generation or the younger wave of home seamstresses does needlework like this. This is a garment that was made to last as long as its owner was beautiful. It has traveled more than six thousand miles from its origins in Edinburgh or London or the West Riding of Yorkshire, across to Colorado, circling back in the past couple of months to Pennsylvania. And it has taken on something of everywhere it has been: The garment smells of scented soap, a bit of English damp, and an overlay of dry Colorado—where we found it carefully folded in a box among my mother’s things, after her death. She left no record that it was my grandmother’s work, but it’s obvious where this hand-crafted garment came from. 

The perfectly even Singer-stitched thread, with occasional hand-stitched runs, pleating the ivory cotton at the waist. The buttons are hand-covered with fabric so they match the rest of the garment perfectly. The waist has no elastic: It has a quarter-inch drawstring made of the same fine ivory fabric. It has three tiers, ending in a hem of two layers, ruffled with horizontal pleats and hand-trimmed, scalloped machine-made lace. It was clearly made by a professional.  

The two buttonholes down the side show that she was at the peak of her skills. 

It’s not at all a stretch to imagine that these buttonholes are the work of the best buttonhole-maker in Edinburgh, making garments for herself, and perhaps thinking of the handsome kilt-wearing groom who walked her down the aisle a few years earlier.