The guys from Sew Fast Sew Easy sent me a couple of copies of their book about deconstructing and reconstruction clothing. It is called Rip It! and it is written by Elissa Meyrich. This book no doubt will stir some different feelings, read about the stitch n bitch controvery here, here, here and here.

There is a small flurry of clothing surgery books hitting the streets at the moment, which I am really excited by. I personally love the idea of re-invigorating old clothes and giving them a second life. I was interested to see what this book could bring to the party.

The books starts off with an intro saying that Rip it! will “free you from the frustrations of not being able to implement many of your ideas and give you a working knowledge of techniques to help you translate your personal designs into new clothing by showing you step-by-step methods and giving you guidelines to get you started“. So does this book live up to this intro and teach techniques and give you the tools to implement your ideas? Lets see.

This book technically is for beginners, it starts off with some really basic info on tools and fabric, cutting and using patterns, and hand sewing stitches, this first section also has ideas of where to source second hand clothing to use in your designs. On that technical note there is also a glossery at the back with the basic sewing terms covered.

The main section of the book are the ideas and instuctions - starting off with t-shirts and discusses fitting and shaping, illustration are pretty basic but you get the general idea, its where they start getting technical with zips and buttons that the simplistic illustrations just don’t cut it. More sections on mix and matching sweaters together to create something original. A section on pants with tips on revitalising pants by flaring them or lengthening them and the classic jeans to skirt recipe. Another section on skirts with tips on how to re-shape and alter waistbands.

While this book has some good ideas, none of them are particularly original. And while the book does go over techniques and give step by step instructions they are so poorly illustrated with too simple drawings and terrible dark grey and orange photographs that it is quite difficult even for a more advanced sewer to understand quite what to do.

After I have said all of that I still have two books to give away - anyone want to make up their own mind about this book - shoot me an email with your address to whipup@gmail.com and the first two emails get a book. Maybe you can let me know what you thought of this book. Thanks for all your emails - both books are now taken - cheers, K.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 1st, 2006 at 7:56 am and is filed under whiplash. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.