Buttonholes (tutorial # 2)

As promised, here is my favorite buttonhole recipe.

Step 1. Decide buttonholes' placement

I always pick buttons for a project together with yarn. It gives me enough time to change my mind if I picked wrong. And if I don't change my mind by the time the buttonholes are made, it means that I made a right choice!
Make the left front first and calculate the rows between the future buttonholes. If you put markers in place of buttons, it makes your life and calculations easier.

Step 2. Execution

Get to the row where you want to start a buttonhole (keep in mind that a buttonhole is made in two rows)

For this particular example I picked up 9 sts to make 3 sts buttonhole.

Knit the first 3 sts:

Leaving the working yarn behind your work, bind off buttonhole sts (just thread them one into another like you do while binding off without actually knitting them): 

In my case I bound off three sts to have a buttonhole right in the middle:

Get back to the working yarn and turn your work to the wrong side:

Pick up sts from the last st on your left needle. I picked up 4 sts because I bound off 3 sts, but my general rule - pick up as many sts as were bound off plus one

Turn the work back to the right side and knit together the last st on the left needle and the first st on the right needle

Keep knitting till the end of the row. In the purl row purl, or knit, or knit and purl picked up stitches as you go

Ta-da! Your first buttonhole is finished.

If you don't knit together the last picked up st and the first st on the right needle you might have a visible gap at the end of your buttonhole. See?

And you don't want more gaps than needed.
Does this method have room for improvement? Of course. Yet, since I found it somewhere on the Internet more than 10 years ago I've been making buttonholes this way and they serve me well. They are sturdy enough and don't stretch as much as the ones made with yarn overs. If you want them to look even prettier you can sew around later using a sewing needle and thread of the same color. Sometimes I do it, mostly to connect the first bound off st with the previous one.
I hope it helps!