subject: The Perfect Fit: The Classic Guide to Altering Patterns [print this page] The Perfect Fit: The Classic Guide to Altering Patterns
Good fit improves the comfort and appearance of any garment and is the reason many people sew their own clothes. However, it's common to worry about ruining a pattern when you cut it apart to make a fitting adjustment. The Perfect Fit makes pattern alterations easy with proven methods illustrated step-by-step.
Wow! This book is amazing. Even if the alteration information was terrible (which it's not), the beginning of the book would be well worth it's price. It begins by teaching you how to select the right pattern first. The authors explain how commercial patterns are built, and the differences between classic, relaxed and dramatic fit.
The fitting section begins with a comprehensive figure analysis. Rather than having you squint at yourself in a mirror and decide, "Why yes, I AM a perfect hourglass figure," it explains how to make a full-sized body drawing, label the points and literally connect the dots to reveal your body type.
The book is stuffed with pictures. There are tons of pictures truyen tranh hai showing "average" body parts, and bodies on both sides of average. It was really easy to look at the pictures and say "Those are my arms. That's what my inner thigh looks like." I also didn't have to try to figure out how to perform each alteration, because there are detailed pictures that show every single line, snip and slide. It covers a wide range of alterations, explaining adjustments for shoulders, arms, waist, hips, thighs, bust, abdomen, and seat.
Each adjustment section is then divided into minor adjustments and major adjustments, shows procedures for doing both, and includes the maximum recommended amount of adjustment so you don't distort your pattern. For each variation from average, the book includes a chart the explains the fitting goal, flattering styles and details, unflattering styles and details and common pattern adjustments. It helps you start out by choosing a pattern that is likely to flatter your body without a lot of adjustments. Finally, I felt like the book avoided judgemental labels like skinny/fat, large/flat, which I appreciated.
My only (extremely small) issue with this book is that some of the fashion photos are outdated. This must be a later edition of a previously published book. Although it is copywritten 2005, some of the clothing styles look like mid to late 1980s. This absolutely does not affect the information in the book, since it is talking about alterations, not choosing fashions.
However, it came up just a couple times, such as the author's enthusiastic embrace of shoulder pads, and a complete lack of discussing bootcut pants and where they fit on the body-type spectrum. On the whole, it was a very small issue. Just don't look too closely at their fashion plates at the beginning of each chaper!
I'm not sure how this works, but this is exactly the same book as the book of the same title in the Singer Sewing Reference Library, published in 1987! Even the cover is the same: only the color has been changed. In this case, I realized that I owned the book before purchasing it. Once before, I bought a quilting book that was a Joanne's reissue of a book that Better Homes and Gardens had originally put out. In that case, some of the content and illustrations had been changed, but not much.
I felt ripped off and returned the book. A nuisance. Sometimes there will be a note on the copyright page stating that it is a reissue, but that was not the case. That said; this is one of my go-to books for fitting problems. The photos are so helpful and clear. It is a basic text, but very thorough. It's a must-have for most sewing libraries, in my opinion
