I have become OBSESSED with T-shirt surgery of late, and it is all due to THIS book.
I first spotted it last month or so. I have writing group meetings that take place in a Borders bookstore (crack, I tell you... CRACK! Course, that's why they let us have meetings there, isn't it?), and I started getting rides over with a friend who arrives to the meetings about an hour or hour and a half or two in advance. So I suddenly had a lot of pre-browsing time. I picked up this book along with the usual knitting books and looked through it and drooled...then remembered that (a) my sewing machine is busted and therefore I hardly ever sew unless I go over to where I volunteer and borrow a machine, and (b) since I got out of college, I hardly ever do any sewing any more anyway. I've done sewing projects for a grade for years, and for 4-H ribbons for years before that, and it got tiring. So I'd put it back. And then the next time I went to the store, I'd go pull it out and drool over it some more, then have the same arguments with myself and put it back.
Obviously, I caved in and bought it this month. And it is AWESOME. Seriously, I have gotten to the point where I'm leaving the book where I volunteer for friends to borrow and flip through it, and I've recruited one girl into trying a shirt from it.
I normally don't try to do any crafts IN a book before I review it (really, that's gonna depend on your level of skill, not mine), but for this one, I have made an exception. If you ever read the craft blog, you can see that I've been doing several projects from the book of late. (And there's at least 2 more I have in the pipeline right now.)
T-shirt surgery, for the record, is cutting up, resewing, and/or just plain reconstructing a T-shirt into either some other kind of garment, or a far more stylish shirt. This is a REALLY EASY book to follow. If you have little to no sewing experience, you can use this book. If you hate sewing machines or don't have one, you don't absolutely NEED one to do most projects in this book. A lot of it is no-sew entirely. You don't need much in the way of materials beyond sewing scissors, thread and needles, and chalk to do a lot of it. I've never done such free and easy and simple and QUICK sewing in my life. Most of these things take about 3 hours, tops. The patterns are easy to read and do, there's a minimum of work, and it's really fun. And there's a lot of variety of styles so that there's enough stuff in here for everyone to find several projects that they like.
Seriously, now I am going around buying up other T-shirt surgery books and analyzing every shirt in my wardrobe for cutting up purposes now. I am hooked... at least until I burn out on sewing again, anyway.
Five stars. Really bloody excellent primer for how to do this.
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