Best Sewing Blogs, Books, and Patterns

Sewing blogs and books are great for new sewing ideas, to keep your motivation high, or to get inspired in the first place. Some of the blogs and books may be for people with more advanced skills than you have right now--or than I will probably ever have. But they can still inspire. Happily there are now many blogs, books, and patterns full of ideas that are easy for anyone to do.

On this page, you will find blogs, books, patterns, and my own comments about all of them. I'm a librarian and I love to ferret out great information. I've got a section about Folkwear patterns because my sister-in-law Alexandra was one of the founders of the company. In this old photo, I'm wearing the first Folkwear pattern I made, a long dress from a tablecloth we had when I was a kid. The photo was taken by my husband, Kelly Hart. That dress eventually did wear out but I've used the same pattern several other times and still wear a couple of those dresses.

Sewing Blogs

There are so many sewing blogs! Many of them also discuss knitting, being a mom, cooking, and other topics. The first of these links is a great list of a dozen blogs that the writer loves. The second is a blog I love.

Sewing Books

This is by far the best sewing book for beginners! Diana Rupp founded the well-known Make Workshop, and I'm sure she is a great teacher because this book covers so many useful things so clearly. She even tells you how to sit at your machine without getting a backache! Plus lots and lots of tips and projects.

As a Librarian, I Can't Help Loving Books...

Sewing books are great references. I never buy them for my Kindle, as I always prefer to get them where they can be handy in my sewing area. Books make great gifts for friends who sew, but I probably buy more just for myself.

Spiral bound books are the best for things like step-by-step sewing tutorials, since they lie flat.

This list of books from Amazon includes some of the top rated books on sewing. If you click on one of them and go to Amazon, you can find more books on the same sewing topic, whatever it might be. All of the books I've chosen to list here are ones that have at least 20 favorable customer reviews, so you know you'll be getting something really worthwhile if you get one.

Ever had trouble with the tension on your sewing machine? Learn from this book.

Sewing Patterns

You have a lot of choices when it comes to finding a sewing pattern. You can get the old standbys, Simplicity, McCalls, Butterick, and Vogue. You can get sewing patterns from newer companies... there are hundreds if not thousands of them. Quite a few of the blogs give away or sell patterns as well.

So what to do? You can look around here, you can look around local stores, you can explore the link I give you just below.

Do check the difficulty level on any pattern, especially if your skills are beginner level. Also, I love to buy patterns that I can make in different ways for different looks. The second thing I make from a pattern is about twice as easy as the first! And later ones get even easier, I find.

It's a great resource for seeing what other people have thought about patterns. You can join for free, as I did, or you can join with a fee to get access to more.

These have excellent reviews!

My sister-in-law Alexandra Hart (then Alexandra Jacopetti) founded Folkwear with a couple of other women. I was living essentially next door to her at the time, as a bunch of us family members had bought an old summer camp together in California and turned it into a family-community. Hey, it was the 70s!

The old photo of me at the start of this page was of my first Folkwear project, the Syrian Dress, which I see was the 5th pattern they brought out. I made quite a few of the patterns, and I think the Nepali blouse was my favorite. Having had so much fun with an old tablecloth for my dress, I bought another old tablecloth for the blouse and sadly the fabric didn't hold up for more than about 10 years. Oh well!

There are over 100 Folkwear patterns now on Amazon. Here are a few of my favorites, and I chose ones that other people have given good ratings to as well.

Some More Goodies

Where a blog is usually written by one person, here are places you can interact (or not if you don't want to), with lots of good ideas for sewing.

This is a live feed from eBay, so everything is current. Click on anything that you're curious about!

Click on one of the little boxes below the main video to check out another video. I chose a very basic one on how to sew on a button, as well as how to hem, sew a dart, and do a French seam.

Please note that if you click through to Amazon.com from here and if you buy something, Squidoo and I may share a commission, at no cost to you. Clicking on some of the other links might also yield me some commission. I appreciate the income, as it enables me to spend time doing writing like this.