Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

If you are at all acquainted with the current market of Japanese sewing books, you probably have heard of the name Yoshiko Tsukiori. She's one of the most popular and prolific authors in her field, with a multitude of fans around the world. This book is the first in a series of 3 volumes named Stylish Dress Book, and very often seen discussed in sewing blogs and community sites. For example, the French sewing community Japan Couture Addicts [...] has literally hundreds of member posts of projects from this book (both the original Japanese and the French editions). I highly recommend visiting this site to see what sorts of styles are included in this book, and to inspire your creativity with ideas of how the styles can be executed. The designs in this book have a distinctly quaint, countryside aesthetic, best suited for printed woven cottons, such as those produced by Liberty of London (prominently featured in this book). If your tastes range more toward the current RTW trends or more modern deconstructed styles, you might not find the dresses very appealing. The sizes in this book covers bust measurements 78cm (30.75 inches) to 102cm (40.25 inches), which is broader than what the original Japanese edition offered. It seems they added in 2 larger sizes for the American edition. If you are larger than this size range, you might still be able to use the patterns provided, as the designs have a fairly large amount of ease, and most people seem to go a size or two down to achieve a closer fit. If you have a little bit of experience with pattern resizing, then it would probably be pretty straightforward to resize the patterns, as the pieces are mostly boxy and geometric, and the construction is pretty simple and mostly involves straight-line sewing. *A note to people not familiar with Japanese-style sewing books* The patterns in this book, as with pretty much all other Japanese sewing books, come printed on sheets of poster-sized paper inserted in the back of the book. The pieces overlap with each other, to save space, but they are color-coded to help you tell them apart. You must trace them onto a separate piece of paper (e.g. Sewable Swedish Tracing Paper or Bienfang Sketching Paper) and use the traced copy to make the dress. You also have to add seam allowances after you trace out each piece, and the instructions for each dress includes a cutting layout diagram that shows you how much to add for each seam. It is important that you are aware of this if you are considering buying this or any other Japanese sewing book. If you are unable or unwilling to trace out the patterns and add seam allowances by hand, then this book will not be of much use to you. *** The quality of the translation is very good. Even though you can obtain almost all of the necessary information through the diagrams alone, the written directions are very well translated, conveying clear meaning and retaining the succinctness of the original Japanese. This edition does seem to omit the short general information section from the Japanese original. There's one page in the front of the book that has the size table, with a paragraph explaining the general format of the patterns, but otherwise no guidance is given for how to use this book, nor are there any general construction tips. Thus, you should probably have some rudimentary experience with dressmaking before tackling this book. This book assumes that you already possess the sort of knowledge given in sewing books like The Colette Sewing Handbook. If you have already made one or two garments, you can probably handle the projects in this book just fine. I was very glad to see that they kept the metric measurements from the original edition. They added in Imperial unit conversions to make it more accessible to American readers, but noted that the metric measurements will give greater precision. Seriously, why are we still on Imperial units? Even the British have gone metric now. One thing that irks me a little about this edition is that the printing seems to be lower quality than the Japanese original. The colors are super-saturated and the photos are fuzzy. One of the things I really love about Japanese sewing books is the gorgeous photography of all the styles in the book; and the poor printing quality of the copy I received rather detracts from that enjoyment. Perhaps later batches will have better printing quality. Overall, I rate this edition at 4.5, for its low-quality printing. I'll round it up to 5 since the translation is quite good, and all of the important content from the original edition is faithfully retained. If you enjoy making clothes, you should definitely pick up a copy, as there are lots of easy and fun dresses in this book, and all the construction steps are not only clearly explained in words, but also meticulously diagramed. If you are able to obtain a copy of the original Japanese edition, I would recommend getting that instead, as that edition has much higher production values, and so would probably be more visually enjoyable. All in all, I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys sewing. The dresses are pretty easy to make, but also give you a lot of room for creativity (as you can see on Japan Couture Addicts), and so novice and veteran sewers alike will find something interesting to do with this book. The diagrams are simply phenomenal, and make the construction process very easy to understand, so it's accessible to sewers with limited experience. Finally, I think it's nice to explore some different styles. The dresses in this book are very different from the types of patterns you get from McCall's and Simplicity, and I think being exposed to a different aesthetic helps you build your personal design vocabulary, which will help you create more awesome clothes :) I also highly recommend the Drape Drape series, by Hisako Sato, and any book by Machiko Kayaki. Happy sewing!