Sew Basic: 34 Essential Skills for Sewing With Confidence

Rating:
Summary: It's a guide for further reading
Review: This book contains reprints of articles on sewing. Each article is only 2 or 3 pages long, and that includes one or more photos or illustrations, so the result is not too much detail. Use this text as a guidebook--if you cannot grasp a particular skill--by reading this book--look elsewhere for more info., more detail, more illustrations--you'll know what to look for. Further, each writer is telling you how they do it. Yes, there alternatives to their way--like using a ruler and a "French Curve" when tracing patterns; you can buy some "bias tape" or you can make your own--stuff like that can only be gotten by reading everything you can get your hands on! That's if you had no one to show you how to sew.

Rating:
Summary: Good Teaching Tool
Review: Good book to have around as a reference and you might learn something new like I did: directional sewing. No wonder things come out weird! But now that I know how to do it, things come out right and collars sit flat.

Rating:
Summary: I learned a few things myself
Review: Good book to have around as a reference and you might learn something new like I did: directional sewing. No wonder things come out weird! But now that I know how to do it, things come out right and collars sit flat.

Rating:
Summary: Good Teaching Tool
Review: I recently taught a small basic sewing class and used this book as a guideline and reference book for the class. My students knew nothing about sewing and in the end they did not want to become great dressmakers, they just wanted to use the sewing machine that had belonged to their Mom or Grandmother ( and had been sitting in a closet..) to do general household sewing and clothing repair. One man was starting a company and needed to learn how to sew in order to make prototypes of his products. Another was a mom who wanted to make simple clothes for her daughter. This book was helpful in that it demystfied basic sewing techniques, was reader friendly, and had enough pictures to explain the techniques without being TOO MUCH information thrown at the novice sewer all at once. My teaching time was basically a "hands on" session where I used the book as a guideline and where any question that they had about sewing could be answered. My students were the " just get to the point and skip the froo froo" type of folks. For them a book that did not assume any sewing knowledge and then gave them what was needed to get from absolutely no sewing skill to completed simple class sewing projects is a good teaching tool.

Rating:
Summary: Poor value
Review: There was little in here. An example on feet is 'use your instruction manual and experiment!". Well if the machine came with an instruction I guess I would and somehow I did not buy this book to be told to use the manual. Instead I would recommend The Complete Guide to Machine Sewing (unfortunately Amazon has this has hard to get :-(, or Sewing 101.
The one thing that this book did teach me was about pattern copying and it is very thoroughly indexed. Still nothing is very in depth and you can get this level of information from practically any source (Readers Digest Guide to Sewing).