Kenmore 6 Stitch — Again

You know how some employees always seem to get named employee of the month? This is a bit like that. I’m revisiting last month’s machine, the Kenmore 6 Stitch. I love this machine! I was working on a small item, the bear shirt that I mentioned in the makerspace post. This shirt was made from a dress shirt that belonged to my dad, so I wanted to use as many of the elements of the shirt as I could in the mini version. I wanted to preserve the buttons and the buttonholes of the shirt, and of course, the scale of a man’s shirt to a teddy bear shirt is quite different, and I had to rethink the pattern to incorporate the existing placket.

I realized that I needed to add a buttonhole to get the scale right. I have not made a buttonhole in a long time: maybe 20 years.

And I honestly do not know how to create a buttonhole on the machine that I have been predominantly using for the last 20 years, a Viking Lily. I bought the Viking Lily because it has a quarter-inch setting that moves the needle to a quarter-inch away from the edge of the presser foot. This is very handy for quilting or anything with a quarter-inch seam allowance. Quilting doesn’t call for a lot of buttonholes. So I am rusty.

I pulled out the manual for the Kenmore 6, found the buttonhole foot, and sat down to do a test run. I’m not sure it was like riding a bike since I was never particularly good at that, but I did one practice buttonhole it turned out great! I did a second buttonhole on the tiny shirt, and I think it was a good match. It was super easy.

The Kenmore 6 and the Kenmore 8 have a three-step buttonhole with a bar tack stitch across the top, zigzag down the left side, then another bar tack stitch across the bottom, and a zigzag stitch up the right side. There are some adjustments that you can make, and I did that with my practice buttonhole.

For 20-ish years, I really only sewed with the Kenmore 8, so I thought every machine had a bar tack stitch. Sadly, no. It was like catching up with an old friend.

So the Kenmore 6 Stitch earned more time in the spotlight this month thanks to its nice stitching and easy buttonhole that proved to be a good match for the existing buttonholes on the shirt. Sewing win!