I took sewing classes ages ago in the pursuit of designing stuffed animals and aprons with my best friend in middle school. Since that time, I've been more or less regulated to hand sewing as all memories of the sewing machine lessons I received have flown out the proverbial door.
My sister-in-law, an accomplished seamstress, whips up all sorts of fantastical costumes with her sewing machine, and she and my mother-in-law decided to purchase a Singer Curvy for me a couple Christmases ago because they knew I wanted to get back in the swing of things. Since then, I've been pleased with the things I've created: a Nintendo 3DS case, a Christmas ornament, a cat bed, but I've been stuck using a straight stitch outside of the odd embellishment (where I have no idea of the proper use).
So I decided to look into Super Stitches Sewing in an effort to understand my machine just a little bit better, and it helped me do just that. First of all, the quality of the book - the cover, the binding, the feel of the pages - is fantastic. Reference books have to hold up to the rigors of heavy use, and I've been pleased with the feel of the book as I hold it open with my coffee mug or elbow while balancing bobbins and thread.
The contents of the book itself and the explanation of each of the stitches is very straightforward and easy to follow. It's, truly, exactly what I needed: a list of stitches and the details of what they can do. Most of the time when I've looked for explanations I get long, rolling (tl;dr) paragraphs that make my eyes cross or limited lists of a few basic stitches with very little information where I'm expected to "fill in the gaps." There's a lot of power in straight-forward simplicity, and this book made more sense to me than anything I've read online in the past on the subject, truth be told.
It truly helped me understand my machine a bit better, took a lot of (unnecessary) mystery out of the "fancy" stitches listed next to that old familiar straight stitch, and I feel it improved my experience sewing by a large margin. I enjoy being able to have an easy place to go back to and understand what I'm doing better. I would highly recommend checking this book out if your machine has been a bit of a mystery. I don't think you'll be disappointed.
I received this book from the Blogging for Books program in exchange for an honest review.
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