Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I am not a novice but haven’t done any sewing for many years; so I decided to get this book as a refresher course. Encouraged by lots of positive reviews I was ready to love it. At first glance I was excited to find so much wonderful information packed in one place. Then I started wondering if people who gave it 5-star reviews had actually read it. I spent a couple of evenings with the book, prepared totally to enjoy it and get inspired. With slight disappointment I started noticing that lots of big pictures are accompanied by a description using a font that is tiny, grey color, and not very legible. I was ready to forgive and put up with that, but then I discovered lots of unattractive photographs of poorly sewn garments. When you ‘Look Inside’ on the PDF before buying it, all illustrations you see are quite nice, aren’t they? So what am I so critical about? If you look carefully through the PDF you can see the enormous images of tools with the tiny text next to them. It makes it pretty but useless. What are not shown on the PDF are the close-up images of sewing details and some of them are shockingly bad! See a couple of snapshots I took. If this book was intended to deliver most information in the form of pictures, then why not to use really good photos? It’s kind of ironic that the instructions under the picture of a belt with really crooked stitches reminds us “Make sure the sewn line is accurate through the point.” Maybe this book can be somewhat useful for a novice with 20/20 vision who is not very picky about the quality of illustrations. For an intermediate sewer this book is not inspiring. Disappointed. Would not recommend.