The Perfect Fit: The Classic Guide to Altering Patterns

by Creative Publishing International

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. This complete guide includes analyzing a figure, measuring the body, customizing the pattern, and fine-tuning the fit with small adjustments like moving buttons and reshaping darts. The Perfect Fit shows how to change a commercial pattern sized for millions of women into a sewing blueprint sized to fit your figure alone. Altering patterns has never been easier, thanks to the help of 400 step-by-step photographs!

Genres: Sewing, Nonfiction

128 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2005

Reviews

[Margie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clear photographs, and good instructions on how to determine what your figure flaws are. Many alteration books tell how to alter patterns, but few have this information on assessing one's own flaws, in order to choose the right alteration. Recommended.

[Cori · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book seemed a bit dated to me, which is okay since patterns and alterations stay more or less the same, however I would have liked to see a wider variety of body types in it. Their full tummy or full seat alteration models were not very full by today’s standards. Maybe an entirely different book is needed for plus size alterations.

Also, to me it seemed that the guidance for how to flatter different figures could be very conflicting, for example if you have a large bust and a long waist, one section says stay away from wide waistbands if you have a large bust but then another section says wide waistbands flatter a long waist. So having example combos for people who have multiple differences from the standard figure would also be nice.

Overall, I’m glad I checked this out from the library, it gave a lot of useful and interesting info, but it’s not something I would buy to have on hand all the time since I think I’d need to combine multiple of these alterations, and I can find something more specific online.

[Debbie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book told all about how to alter patterns for clothes to fit various ways in which a body might not be "standard." It contained lots of pictures and detailed instructions for altering the patterns. It'll be very helpful whenever I re-learn how to sew!

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Similar techniques to FFRP, but enough differences to make this a worthwhile purchase. Assumes a little bit of background knowledge, so there's less handholding than FFRP.