Carolyn N. K. Denham - Merchant & Mills Sewing Book: Hand Sewing Techniques / Machine Know-How / Tools / Notions / Projects / Patterns

First published in the United States of America in 2013 by Chronicle Books LLC.
First published in the United Kingdom in 2012 by Collins & Brown.

Design and text copyright 2012 by Collins & Brown.
Photographs 2012 by Roderick Field.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-4521-2549-7 (hc)
ISBN 978-1-4521-3796-4 (epub, mobi)

Chronicle Books LLC
680 Second Street
San Francisco, CA 94107
www.chroniclebooks.com

This book is a condensed volume of the Merchant & Mills take on the art of sewing and the joy of making. It is a response to the questions we are most often asked, and is by no means definitive, yet it clearly reflects our unique way of doing things. Our mission is to enable you to express yourself through textiles, equipped with the necessary skills and knowledge to join the sewing renaissance. These are great times for makers and they will only get better as more of us take up our needles and demand that sewing is recognized as a hard-earned, respectable skill.

Cooking offers some handy parallels for understanding how we approach sewing. Think of the food you might serve at a dinner party. You would neither present your guests with something as humble, plain and simple as porridge, nor present a 15 course feast on account of the time, planning and expense it would demand. You are more likely to impress your friends with your skills when feeding them your own favorite recipes the things you love and want to eat, that say something about you. You will make something delicious and achievable in the time allowed by a busy life.

Whatever you serve, you want it to be desirable and special. Sewing is the same. Make something that you actually want to wear, neither plain as oats nor exotic as stuffed sparrow, but something you can put on with a little glow of pride that says, This is me, I made this. Choose only the best ingredients from the original pattern to beautiful cloth and the right tools. If this book had to be condensed to just one line, it would say: Keep it simple and do it well.

We love sewing and believe in it. The art of sewing provides the invisible thread that literally holds together the world we know. It is everywhere, from the clothes we wear to the sails that enabled the discovery of America. It is in our shoes and bags, the seats on the bus and lurks quietly all around the home. It is best friend to the upholsterer, the seamstress and tailor, the diva and the surgeon, and it is as ancient as time itself. Using animal gut, twine or thread to meld together precedes textiles, reaching back to the very beginnings of humanity when our ancestors sat around the first fire and stitched animal skins together to make up for their own evolutionary lack of fur. Before television, radio and writing, it kept busy the hands of millions, creating warmth, comfort, art and expression. It still does.

Yet despite its glorious heritage, the sheer joy and immeasurable satisfaction that making brings seems to have been all but forgotten. The skills that were once passed down have now been passed by in the name of convenience. Watch a small child play and it is all about imagination and creation: piling bricks, drawing, cutting and sticking. There is surely nothing more fulfilling than the successful expression of an idea; the alchemy of thoughts becoming things. When we were small, we knew this as fact and we proudly showed the fruits of our efforts, hopefully to much cooing and encouragement. But school takes over and narrows our creativity into narrow channels until we want only to be like everybody else. We forget our unique disposition and quirky style. Later, we have jobs and become a demographic. We are bombarded with standardized goods in every shopping center and, if we long for the unique, we really have to hunt it out and often pay dearly for it. At Merchant & Mills, we see making not as a poor cousin to shopping but as a way to have long-lasting, beautiful and useful things to be proud of. We want you to spend your time more than your cash and to love the making as much as the result.