My Buttonhole Leveller arrived this morning, it is 9.5cm long and 2.8cm wide at the top. There are two legs 1cm apart and on these legs is a very fine textured plastic obviously used for gripping the fabric and also the underside of the long slide part of the foot as this is textured on both sides. I have just got my slide foot out and it sits quite nicely on the Leveller, and the actual foot part that slides moves easily.
It will certainly be interesting to try this out and see how it works.
Of course I do also have an ordinary short Bernina Buttonhole foot and gather that there is a way for sewing buttonholes using that, but as I had spent a lot of money on this fancy Bernina and the fact that it should remember the buttonhole just stitched and repeat this any number of times really appealed to me, so I haven’t tried just using the ordinary foot.
However I do have another older Bernina – the 830 Record (so non computerised) and again have the opportunity of using an ordinary buttonhole foot or one with a slide, so I will see what happens if I use the Leveller with that machine. I do love sewing corded buttonholes, they are so neat and I usually use Perle embroidery thread, and find that if I close the zig zag stitch up I can use white cord and it does not show through. I have even used overlocking thread over cord as this thread matched the garment far better than the ordinary sewing thread.
Pixie I do hope that you manage to find something to help you. I know that sometimes it is possible to ‘borrow’ something from another machine’s accessories and they work extremely well, however with the more expensive and complicated computer machines I would be extremely careful as I gather it is very easy to knock the timing out and that then means the machine going away to be sorted – an expensive exercise as well as being very inconvenient.
A long time ago I do remember reading something about sewing lines of decorative stitches quite close to one another and doing the first row is fine, but from then on part of the foot is possibly travelling over the embroidered line and thus this throws the line out slightly as one side is higher than the other, so trying to match up patterns exactly is difficult and quite a skill. So you either have to have the lines of embroidery spaced adequately apart so that the foot is not being affected on the next run. Of course the experts at the Sewing Machine Schools make stitching this way look so easy and it is not necessarily the case for us.
I clearly remember when I bought my Elna SU way back in 1975 that the lady demonstrating made everything look so easy and I asked if I could have the demonstration pieces – apparently at the time she was not supposed to give these away, and of course the fabric used was quite stiff, so she was gaily embroidering letters, some were scrolling letters all done free hand – and of course get the machine home and we do not have this stiff type of fabric, but I still have my samples, this was long before stabilising fabrics were available, and the answer then was to use copy paper and tear it away afterwards.
Since typing the above your last note came in and it is a great shame that Pfaff do not do anything like this.
Here is one last idea for you, can you get to a Machine Dealer or a Stitching Show that deals with all different brands and ask them about a Buttonhole Leveller - you never know they might have something in stock and be prepared to show you how it works on different machines - the problem you have encountered is not unusual, so you never know someone might have the answer for you. Good luck.