Bingo Square: How-To
I decided this pandemic period that I would take up sewing! I love crafts and hate trying on clothes in stores. Also, I’d been gifted a sewing machine by my very sweet mother-in-law a few Christmases ago, and now I finally had some extra money to be able to buy fabric and get to sewing! Spoiler alert: it’s super fun and I have spent way too much money on cute fabric.
Not knowing where to start (and not interested in taking classes, at least right now) I turned to YouTube, blogs, and perhaps the most obvious starting point: Sewing for Dummies. I’d read a few other books in the Dummies series (I think snippets from the one on the writing programme Scrivener) and felt reasonably satisfied. This one was about the same. As a how-to, it’s pretty useful. I read it cover-to-cover, skimming some of the parts I wasn’t so interested in, and bookmarking lots of points to come back to. The pages on different types of fabrics has been pretty helpful, and there’s lots on what types of stitches to use in different situations, as well as general tips and good practices. The writing style is engaging enough for a how-to without being obnoxious. I read it on Scribd but I am tempted to get a hard-copy version to have on hand.
I’m not going to give it a rating (it seems weird for me to rate a how-to book–how would I even begin?). But I will recommend it in case you’re like me and you want to take up a new hobby or want a quick-reference book for different situations.
P.S. This is the sewing machine model I have. It’s pretty great for beginners (there are little pictorial guides on it for winding your bobbin and threading your needle), and there are helpful YouTube videos for it in case you get stuck (like I did when I accidentally took the whole bobbin mechanism out instead of just the bobbin case). And it’s a super cute colour!
