Add to that a sense of fun, and you have the sew-it-yourself Stylish Dress Book. Complete with stunning full-color photos, this Japanese sewing book (in English) gives you instructions and pull-out patterns for unique Japanese fashion—26 relaxed and comfortable yet elegant dresses and tops—pretty, timeless pieces that can be worn year after year, by women of all ages and sizes. The detailed diagrams and easy-to-follow instructions take you step-by-step from layout to finished garment. The no-rules looks pictured in this book are perfect for today's carefree fashion sensibility and will inspire you to have fun with fabric and style. Simple lines make these garments perfect for women of all ages and all sizes. This book includes a complete western-sized sewing pattern for each design that is easily adjusted to fit your body form. The concise diagrams and simple instructions allow you to develop your unique style with ease and confidence.

    An account of the year Clara Parkes spent transforming a 676-pound bale of fleece into saleable yarn, and the people and vanishing industry she discovered along the way.

    . . What is remarkable about this book is that a history of knitting can function so well as a survey of the changes in women's roles over time."--The New York Times Book ReviewAn historian and lifelong knitter, Anne Macdonald expertly guides readers on a revealing tour of the history of knitting in America. In No Idle Hands, Macdonald considers how the necessity--and the pleasure--of knitting has shaped women's lives.Here is the Colonial woman for whom idleness was a sin, and her Victorian counterpart, who enjoyed the pleasure of knitting while visiting with friends; the war wife eager to provide her man with warmth and comfort, and the modern woman busy creating fashionable handknits for herself and her family. Macdonald examines each phase of American history and gives us a clear and compelling look at life, then and now. And through it all, we see how knitting has played an important part in the way society has viewed women--and how women have viewed themselves.Assembled from articles in magazines, knitting brochures, newspaper clippings and other primary sources, and featuring reproductions of advertisements, illustrations, and photographs from each period, No Idle Hands capture the texture of women's domestic lives throughout history with great wit and insight."Colorful and revealing . . . vivid . . . This book will intrigue needlewomen and students of domestic history alike."--The Washington Post Book World

    With names such as City of Paris, Penn Traffic, The Maze, Maison Blanche, or The Popular, they suggested spheres far beyond mundane shopping. Nicknames reflected the affection customers felt for their favorites, whether Woodie's, Wanny's, Stek's, O.T.'s, Herp's, or Bam's.      The history of downtown department stores is as fascinating as their names and as diverse as their merchandise. Their stories encompass many themes: the rise of decorative design, new career paths for women, the growth of consumerism, and the technological ingenuity of escalators and pneumatic tubes. Just as the big stores made up their own small universes, their stories are microcosmic narratives of American culture and society.      The big stores were much more than mere businesses. They were local institutions where shoppers could listen to concerts, see fashion shows and art exhibits, learn golf or bridge, pay electric bills, and plan vacations - all while their children played in the store's nursery under the eye of a uniformed nursemaid.From Boston to San Diego and Miami to Seattle, department stores symbolized a city's spirit, wealth, and progressiveness. Situated at busy intersections, they occupied the largest and finest downtown buildings, and their massive corner clocks became popular meeting places. Their locations became the epicenters of commerce, the high point from which downtown property taxes were calculated. Spanning the late 19th century well into the 20th, their peak development mirrors the growth of cities and of industrial America when both were robust and flourishing.       The time may be gone when children accompany their mothers downtown for a day of shopping and lunch in the tea room, when monogrammed trucks deliver purchases for free the very same day, and when the personality of a city or town can be read in its big stores. But they are far from forgotten and they still have power to influence how we shop today.       Service and Style recreates the days of downtown department stores in their prime, from the 1890s through the 1960s. Exploring in detail the wide range of merchandise they sold, particularly style goods such as clothing and home furnishings, it examines how they displayed, promoted, and sometimes produced goods. It reveals how the stores grew, why they declined, and how they responded to and shaped the society around them.

    Your One-Stop Source for Crazy Quilting Know-HowFrom Victorian quilts to contemporary works of art, crazy quilting has evolved into a beautiful mixture of piecing, embroidery, and fabric techniques.Crazy Quilting: The Complete Guide tells you everything you need to know to create your own beautiful heirloom crazy quilts, including:10 different methods for piecingMore than 100 embroidery stitches for ribbons, flosses and threadsTechniques for dyeing, painting, stamping, printing, and embroidering on silk, cotton, rayon, wool and linenInstructions for adding buttons, beads, tassels, cording and other dimensional embellishmentsTips for finishing your quiltsWhether you are just getting started or have been quilting for years, Crazy Quilting: The Complete Guide is guaranteed to be the most crazy quilting resource you turn to the most.

    The TV series looks for the nation's best amateur sewer, watched over by judges Savile Row tailor Patrick Grant and doyenne of the WI May Martin while host Claudia Winkleman offers encouragement.Capturing the creative energy of the series, the book provides an irresistible collection of over 25 projects covering garments and homewares that will delight sewing enthusiasts everywhere. As in the series, the projects offer something for both sexes and all ages. Garments include a flattering tea dress, pencil skirt, unisex pyjama bottoms and a waistcoat. The homewares and accessories include aprons, a stylist tote bag, laundry bag, a selection of cushion designs and three different window dressings. All are complete with instructinos and patterns for sizes 8 to 16 - the patterns are also available as a PDF download free with purchase.Including a number of designs from the TV series, technical know-how and insider sewing tips from the judges, this book will help the beginner achieve professional results.

    This fifth edition continues to offer an introduction to the principles of pattern cutting, with a range of good basic blocks and examples of their application to garments.New for this edition is the inclusion of colour to help students recognize the different sections of the book and to enhance the garment illustrations? Colour illustrations also offer a new dimension to the updated material on computer-aided design and the CAD chapter now provides students with a clear guide to the technology.The size charts have been revised to reflect the changes in body sizing, the co-ordination with European size charts and to the way that clothes are now marketed to different sectors. The great expansion of casual wear has led to the growth of 'flat cutting' with no darting, and the section devoted to this type of cutting has been further expanded.This best-selling textbook with its tried-and-tested presentation of authoritative text and clear diagrams remains the essential purchase for students of fashion and design.

    Plus, the projects are cute to boot!” —Sue Daly, founder of the Renegade Craft FairNo more spending more than you can afford on clothes! Chic & Simple Sewing shows you how to make modern, stylish, and fun clothes you’ll want to wear every day. Plus, you’re in control. You pick the fabrics, the cut, the size—all tailored just for you, not mass-manufactured on an assembly line. For about the price of two or three commercial sewing patterns, this book will give you full-size patterns to make the more than 20 garments, including a classic shift, A-line skirt, and figure-flattering wrap dress. What are you waiting for? Your new, one-of-a-kind wardrobe awaits!

    During this period, accelerated change saw Britain’s turbulent entry into the modern age, and clothing reflected these transformations. Starting with the intimate perspective of clothing the self, Dress in the Age of Jane Austen moves outward through the social and cultural spheres of home, village, countryside, and cities, and into the wider national and global realms, exploring the varied ways people dressed to inhabit these environments. Jane Austen’s famously observant fictional writings, as well as her letters, provide the entry point for examining the Regency age’s rich complexity of fashion, dress, and textiles for men and women in their contemporary contexts.   Lavishly illustrated with paintings, drawings, historic garments, and fashion plates—including many previously unpublished images—this authoritative yet accessible book will help readers visualize the external selves of Austen’s immortal characters as clearly as she wrote of their internal ones. The result is an enhanced understanding of Austen’s work and time, and also of the history of one of Britain’s most distinctive fashion eras.

    In 15 projects organized in three levels, from novice to intermediate, Trish provides expert, easy-to-follow guidance on techniques for surface stitching that provide subtle shadings and a soft, paintlike blending of colors. Sections on materials, the long and short stitch, and helpful practice motifs lead to gorgeous projects like Burgundy Rosebuds, a Wild Pansy, and a Racquet-tailed Roller.

    Under the singular and brilliant lens that Ulrich brings to this study, ordinary household goods--Indian baskets, spinning wheels, a chimneypiece, a cupboard, a niddy-noddy, bed coverings, silk embroidery, a pocketbook, a linen tablecloth, a coverlet and a rose blanket, and an unfinished stocking--provide the key to a transformed understanding of cultural encounter, frontier war, Revolutionary politics, international commerce, and early industrialization in America. We discover how ideas about cloth and clothing affected relations between English settlers and their Algonkian neighbors. We see how an English production system based on a clear division of labor—men doing the weaving and women the spinning--broke down in the colonial setting, becoming first marginalized, then feminized, then politicized, and how the new system both prepared the way for and was sustained by machine-powered spinning.Pulling these divergent threads together into a rich and revealing tapestry of --the age of homespun,--Ulrich demonstrates how ordinary objects reveal larger economic and social structures, and, in particular, how early Americans and their descendants made, used, sold, and saved textiles in order to assert identities, shape relationships, and create history.

    Dye your own fabric, yarn and clothing whilst using soya milk to bind the colours. There is colour potential all around us just waiting to be unlocked!I share my methods with you, step-by-step. The pages are bursting with photos of the dyeing process as well as photos of fabric and yarn samples from lots of different plants.Perhaps you already dye with plants using conventional mordants such as alum and would like to try the more natural soya milk method for fixing colours? Maybe you are beginning your journey with plant dyeing now? Either way, there is something for you in my book.The book covers the following plus morehow to produce long-lasting colours on cellulose (plant) fibres such as cotton, linen & bamboo viscose. how and why to pretreat fabric & yarn in soya milk before dyeing. choosing plants that will give promising results in the dye pot. how to extract the most colour from plants and how to achieve dark colours on cellulose fibres. my methods for producing deep pinks from avocado skins and stones (pits/seeds). altering colours by changing the pH of dye. using iron or rust water to darken your dyed fabric/yarn and expand your palette of colours. painting patterns with iron water. testing fabric & yarn for colour fastness. A note on plant fibresThis book focuses on dyeing cellulose fibres, such as linen, cotton, hemp and bamboo viscose/rayon. I am vegan and do not use any animal protein fibres like wool or silk. Of course my dyeing methods can be applied to animal fibres, if you choose.

    With special attention to the social aspects of knitting, it examines the changes in tools and techniques within different regions. Examined in detail are the history of European knitting before 1500, knitting in Britain from Henry VIII to the Commonwealth, from the Restoration to 1835, during the 19th century, and during World War I and after. Further explorations consider local traditions in the British Isles, knitting as practiced east of the Adriatic, and developments in the Americas. Absorbing reading for knitters and nonknitters alike, this book also defines knitting in relation to other yarn crafts such as crochet and nalbinding and offers a historical glossary and a transcription of the earliest known English knitting pattern. This replaces 0934026351.

    she inspires a love of sewing itself. A contemporary classic, Power Sewing is clearly written with detailed photos; it guides the reader through every facet of garment construction with ease.

    The subjects include a mix of the avant-garde, the traditional, the must-haves, and the totally unexpected. Chapters on individual artists bring readers inside their studios, workshops, and homes, and include Selby’s signature photographs and watercolors of not only the artists and their environments, but also the things that inspire them, the materials they use, their creative process, the people who work alongside them, and the final pieces. From the showroom of one of the Antwerp Six to the studios of Central St. Martins in London to a punk knitter in Brooklyn, Selby captures some of fashion’s biggest names, rising stars, and best-kept secrets.