Everything you'll ever need to know about sewing a placket.

Hello dear readers. I recently got an email from a customer asking if I could help explain how to sew a placket. This is a question I've gotten numerous times working with vintage and vintage-inspired patterns. The placket was a commonly used closure in tap pants, trousers, dresses and blouses in the 1940's. They started to fade out of the spotlight with the advent of the zipper.

 I find that many new sewers are stumped by vintage patterns that automatically assume that one knows how to sew a placket.
I can even remember my first placket in a pair of 1940's tap pants... I had no clue what to do and frantically searched online for instruction. I didn't find any online, but what did help me a great deal was my well-worn 1927 copy of The Art of Dressmaking by Butterick.
I can't recommend this little book enough! Copies regularly come up for sale for quite cheap so if you see one, snap it up, you won't regret it!

The Art of Dressmaking can explain a placket much better than I can, I'm afraid. My sewing machine is buried under a pile of sewing patterns and I promised myself that I would deal with organizing the patterns before I allowed myself to sew. It's hard to explain a placket without sewing one and taking pictures in the process but between the book, and throwing together some illustrations in Photoshop, I think I have it covered for you!
So without further ado, here is the best instruction I have ever found on how to sew a placket:

Lingerie Sew-Along: Tap Panties Finishing Touches Part 11!

I'm ba-ack. Well, to finish my vacation off nicely I had a horrible cold the whole time, and now that we're back and my husband is even more sick than I was, and we've added jet lag and no sleep to the mix? I'm stiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiillllll sick. Ugh.

I really hate leaving you all hanging though, and I'm heavily dosed up with cold medicine right now, so LET"S DO THIS!
There are a few different ways you can finish your inside facings. You can serge the edges and tack them by hand onto the seam allowance, pink them and leave them loose, douse them in vodka and set them on fire, but my favorite is to tape them down. Not the scotch tape way, of course, but the fusible kind like this Dritz Stitch Witchery.

You can use it to fuse two layers of fabric together, or to finish raw edges with seam tape.

Here I have laid down a strip of the (shinny) fusible tape. Next I just stick the (very pretty) vintage rayon seam tape over top and a quick press with the iron makes it permanent.