I have to say, my opinion of pattern-based sewing has improved 100% since buying a tracing wheel. Seriously. What was I waiting for?

Anyhoo - I like this book a lot. As someone else mentioned, three patterns for the price (I ended up paying $13 at Borders) is a steal, and the 30 different dresses are great inspiration, even though I won't wear most of them. I'm 95% finished with my first, the Workin' 9 to 5, and I really like it - I think it will be wearable, which is saying a lot about an old Ikea curtain!

Other things I have conquered on this dress: invisible zippers, darts, creating my own darts in the back, facings, and fusible interfacing. Up next: understanding how exactly I managed to insert those on-seam pockets, and figuring out how to do it "correctly."

***

Three months later, I've worked through the dirndl pattern, and like it much better than the sheath. The possibilities for customizing are endless - I can see myself making a ton of these! ( )

I'm glad I waited until after I finished a garment from this book to review it. I made a working 9-5 sheath dress, and it required many alterations to make it wearable:

1. The raglan sleeves don't fit at all. This is a deficiency noted by other reviewers, and I wish I'd read those reviews before committing to this pattern. There were several inches of excess fabric at the front neck, and just around the shoulder seam both front and back. This was after I'd taken down this seam to a small based on the muslin fit--and I'm not small! I'm 5'8" and my shoulders are not narrow. So I took out about two inches from either side of the front neck piece and resewed it. My raglan sleeves now have a bit of a bend but the front of the garment lies flat. It still isn't perfect and the front and back shoulder seams are still looser than I'd like, but I'm nervous that if I made this any smaller, I wouldn't be able to raise my arms.

2. There was no back shaping. Others have also noted this, and added back darts. I decided to just shape the centre back seam, taking it in by about an inch on either side at the waist and tapering up to the shoulder and down to the hips. This worked fine.

3. Even grading up to a large at the bust was not large enough. I had to let out the darts, lowering the dart point by 1-2" on either side to give myself more space.

4. The waist was a bit too baggy, so I brought it in at either side by about 1/4-1/2".

5. And the skirt pattern, for some ungodly reason known to perhaps no one, was a-line. What kind of sheath dress pattern has an a-line skirt? Ideally, your hem will be pegged a bit, narrower at the bottom than at the hips by 1-2", to make that lovely flattering hour-glass shape. So I altered this as well.

6. The back of the neck is about 2" too high.

This is an awful lot of altering for one sheath dress pattern, and some of it just seems sloppy. There's no excuse for the poor fit of the raglan sleeves nor for the weirdly baggy shape of the skirt. It's called a sheath dress because it's supposed to fit like a sheath. Also, I cut a few inches off the length. It was pretty long.

It was my first effort with an invisible zipper, though, and this part worked out very well. I made an invisible zipper! It's invisible! And it zips! Properly! This has nothing to do with the book, by the way, which contains as its entire instructions on this step, "Install zipper." If you've never installed a zipper before, good luck to you.

Other notes on the book:

The general sewing and dress information in the front of the book is decent, but not targeted to beginning sewists. The patterns do not have seam allowances included--you have to add them before cutting. No information on seam finishing is included, so a good basic knowledge of garment construction will be required to know when and how to do this. The dresses are unlined; for the sheath dress, I needed to add a lining (and I am tired of it in advance). The ideas for altering the basic patterns to make different kinds of dresses are interesting and a good spark to creativity, but it's unlikely that any of the ideas included in the book will be perfect as-is, especially since the book is now a little dated (and so is its fashion sense). However, once you get an actual dress pattern fitted properly, it's likely that you could alter it in any number of ways to make different kinds of dresses.

Also, there are no photos of the finished garments, and the drawings included seem a little suspect. It would have been nice to have photographs to see how the actual finished garments look, rather than someone's artistic conception of it.

I have bought and used other sewing-and-pattern books successfully many times before, so I'm fairly sure my issues here are not from inexperience. The sheath dress pattern was just poor and required a lot of work to make it, well, work. Given this experience I won't be trying the other dress patterns in the book. ( )

I haven't used the book to actually make a dress yet but am looking forward to trying. It is a little daunting; I thought I knew how to sew and have realized from reading this book that I have not always been doing things properly! And the number of pattern drafts and changes to patterns, etc will be time consuming. The main reasons I will not be able to try the book out for a while is because I can tell it will take quite a bit of space to lay everything out and I just don't have any cat-and-toddler-free space available. Some of the instructions are a little confusing; most make sense but there were a few where I was scratching my head, so to speak, and hoping that it is easier to figure out the diagrams when I actually have the matching pieces to work with. These were in the minority, though.

I really believe that with enough time and patience this book will help me become a much better seamstress and designer. There are several dresses I am just dying to make--I will probably start with Oktober. I would not recommend this book for someone who has never sewn before or who is not fairly familiar with sewing patterns! Also, if you just want to whip up a dress really quickly right off the bat, this is not the book for you. Time and patience are definitely going to be a must. ( )