Review on Bag Making Bible Complete Customizing by Carla Anderson

I pre-ordered this book because I was familiar with Lisa Lam's excellent bag sewing blog - it's one of the few sewing books I own. I ordered without reading the reviews. I only knew it was going to be good because Lisa's blog is so outstanding. Luckily I wasn't disappointed at all. The book is really two books in one. First of all, this is a great reference guide that will give you all the details you need to start making your own bags, from basics like gussets to more advanced hardware-related techniques. Tips and tricks are scattered throughout the book, and I really learned a lot from my first read (and I made a lot of bags!). The Bag Making Bible is also a design book with eight sewing patterns. Projects range from simple handbags to complex projects like a messenger briefcase. While eight projects isn't quite as many as you often see in sewing books, these are eight high-quality projects and there isn't any filler that's quite as common in needlework books. A photo of the bag making process is also very helpful, especially when it comes to illustrating the techniques using unfamiliar hardware. One of the things that strikes me is that the author did her test projects in a variety of fabrics and not the quilted cotton that is so often used for all projects in sewing books - it really shows a variety of perspectives. You can achieve this by crafting your own bags. If I could improve two things in this book, I would change the binding to flat spiral binding and change the sample sheets so that they can be used without tracing. However, both of these design choices bring the price of this excellent book down, so these are minor criticisms that are greatly outweighed by the high-quality instructions in the Bible for making bags.