Pattern Fitting With Confidence

Book arrived in a timely manner. Great tips

Pattern Fitting with confidence is an excellent resource for altering a sewing pattern. It is illustrated very well. It has clear instructions. I am very happy with this purchase.

Honestly you cannot go wrong with any instruction that Nancy has written. This book make sense, is well illustrated and easy enough to follow when making alterations on existing sewing patterns.

This book is brilliant. Her methods are really easy. Just one word of warning for English buyers: the measurements are American sizes! Couldn't understand why I was measuring as a size 8 but that is size 12 in English sizes!!!

Excellent, excellent book. See also the related 1h YouTube video (not linked in the book, but you can find it if you search for "Nancy Zieman method"). A couple of small complaints: As Nancy clarifies, for this method to actually give you a good pattern, you must start from a pattern that already fits your neck and above bustline bone structure correctly. Now: (1) The diagram doesn't make it super clear how to take this measurement. However, if you google it, you'll find forum discussions where people suggest putting two hangers / books under your armpits, and measuring straight the space in between. I'm going to try that, as I'm really bad at taking measurements precisely. Anyway, it would have been nice if the book included more explicit guidance on this so I didn't have to google. (2) This measurement correlates straightforwardly with the pattern sizes from the Big 4, but sometimes those patterns use S-M-L sizes, so it's not clear how to handle that, and there are now many other pattern makers that use their own sizing system too. I'm guessing you can try to measure the pattern from armpit to armpit across the front, but I wish I didn't have to guess. In short, it would have been nice if the book included more explicit guidance on how to take this measurement on the patterns you buy directly too. Independently, it would have been nice if every pattern vendor included more information on the patterns they're selling you. As it is, you're left guessing big time, and can't judge if what you're buying is going to suit you even at a basic level till you've bought and measured the actual thing. I've had this experience with a lot of pattern vendors, whether it's those nice project books such as Sew many dresses or The Gentleman's wardrobe or random pattern vendors on the internet. In short,