SewBasic: 34 Essential Skills for Sewing with Confidence

An excellent book for people learning to sew. With good illustrations and step by step instructions, it made a lot of things very clear to me. Put simply - I found this book to be an essential guide in aiding me in doing things correctly. The ABCs of sewing.

I purchased this book to use as a "text book" for a beginning sewing class I was teaching. I was very pleased with the book and my students purchased it also after using my copy during class. It has exactly what I wanted for them: clear and concise directions with good pictures for technique illustrations.

Good for beginners, especially distractable students. The pages are not too full of information and the type is larger instead of smaller which is good for children. It includes color, which appeals to kids, without going overboard. After a child/beginner has gained basics, then a more detailed book is definitely good to "graduate to." This would not necessarily be a reference book. Once the skills are learned, a person might move it off their shelf. I feel a 4th grade student would understand most of the info and need help with understanding some of the techniques. I learned a few new techniques from it. (I teach sewing) I am recommending this book to my students, along with other real good reference type sewing books. "Tailor tacks" is illustrated better than what I have seen so far. I found "Directional Sewing" to be very informational! "Understitching" is also very well explained.

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.

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.