Jeanne of Just String is sharing with us her wealth of knowledge of Elizabethan Stitches and doing a series of Stitch Studies.

See http://juststring.blogspot.com/search/label/stitch%20studies
for 3 posts (so far) on Detached Buttonhole, with details I've never found anywhere else. She has started from the basics -

• Detached Buttonhole
• Detached Buttonhole for Shapes
• Detached Buttonhole with Return

and means to move onto variations of Detached Buttonhole, and other Elizabethan Stitches at a later date.

The posts are very clear, and with lots of photos.

Also, she'd done a really good post on Spiral Trellis Stitch at
http://juststring.blogspot.com/2008/06/spiral-trellis-stitch.html before she decided to launch into a more formal series of studies.

She's a little busy at the moment gestating, but I certainly look forward to more Stitch Studies in the future.