Pattern Making Templates for Skirts & Dresses: All You Need to Design, Adapt, and Customize Your Clothes

I'm a self taught seamstress and this book has been a great help in improving my sewing skills.

clearly written and easily adapted to most patterns

A cheerful and instructive book. Alice also has been a costume maker, so has extra flare. And she worked for years doing custom work, which is also gorgeous (we checked on-line). When inspiration and drafting guidance is needed, this is the book for you!

Having owned this book for a while I've finally got around to following the process of making a dress block from which to make some of the patterns, only to realise the book's shortcomings. The pattern measurements don't include back waist length. The basic block patterns, when printed, lack detail: no size is printed on each pattern piece, and the lines are very faint (and not because my printer needed ink!)In my opinion the sections of the book don't follow a logical sequence, for example the section on how to solve fitting issues is at the back of the book, rather than immediately after the section on "Checking the Fit". That's just one example. Some of the more common fitting issues are omitted (swayback adjustment, for instance), and others are minimally described, so unless you're lucky enough for the basic pattern to fit you from the outset or have fitting experience, this book alone won't help you achieve your perfectly fitted block to adapt as per the patterns.After all that negativity, on to the positives: I love the patterns in the book. Getting the skirt section of the block to fit is much easier than the top section, of course, so I have used that as the basis for the A-line skirt. This has worked extremely well and I have a perfectly fitting skirt, which gives me confidence that the rest of the patterns will also be successful if you have a well fitting block. Just don't expect to achieve that from this book alone.

This is not really for beginners. It’s difficult to understand and I don’t have the confidence to even know where to begin. I think the teaching is very proper, and would be fine if you could attend classes, and use the book at home for reference, but on its own it’s hard. The other frustrating thing is the pictures of the finished items - too much scenery and not close up enough on the garments themselves! I want to see the details of the waistbands etc, and they’re either covered up by another item of clothing not part of the lesson, or too far away in a dark fabric so you can’t see it! The semicircle skirt apparently has a yoke, but you can’t see it in the picture at all. There is lots of useful information in this book but I don’t feel confident or able to draft a pattern after reading it.

It is ok if ou want to make those models which are described in the book. However, if you want to learn the principles of pattern making it is not the best read. Personally, I think you can equally find ready-made patterns for those garment designs without going into trouble creating those patterns yourself, which would save a lot of time.

cant Seem to download the block patterns from the webpage suggested please help 🙏🏼