Books like Alabama Studio sewing patterns by Natalie Chanin

Learn to create perfect-fitting dresses and patterns tailored to your unique body type with The Perfect Fit.

A practical guide for fashion design students, teaching essential construction skills—seams, zippers, collars, and more—through clear sketches and organized chapters that mirror garment assembly.

Fashion DIY guides readers through practical sewing, dressmaking, and textile crafts, offering step-by-step tutorials for creating and customizing women’s tailored garments.

Gerry Cooklin’s concise manual teaches sewing professionals and hobbyists to master pattern cutting for women’s outerwear, covering draping, grading and tailoring techniques.

A fun, hands‑on guide for young readers that teaches how to design and stitch their own shirts, dresses, skirts, robes, and sweaters using simple patterns and basic techniques.

As makers, we tend to learn different stitches over time without thinking much about how they relate to one another. But when Natalie Chanin and her Alabama Chanin and The School of Making teams began to look at needlework closely, they realized all stitches are based on geometric grid systems--and by using grids as guides, they could make learning stitches, even seemingly elaborate ones, as easy as child's play. In The Geometry of Hand-Sewing, Chanin presents their breakthrough method, featuring illustrated instructions (for both right- and left-handed stitchers) for more than 100 stitches--from the most basic straight and chain to the more fanciful feather and herringbone; photos of both right and wrong sides; and guidelines for modifying stitches to increase one's repertoire further. To simplify learning, the book also includes two plastic stitching cards die-cut with the grids on which every stitch in the book is based. These reusable cards can be stitched through for practicing (just as children use lacing cards to learn to tie shoes) or used as stencils for transferring grids to fabric.