Packed with key skills and friendly know-how, this essential guide is ideal for anyone taking their first steps into dressmaking The latest title in Debbie Shore's Sewing Room Secrets series, this essential guide is packed with key skills and friendly know-how and is ideal for anyone taking their first steps into dressmaking. It covers the important basics such as: how to read any pattern; how to adapt and adjust a pattern; how to choose, mark and cut fabric; how to add zips, pockets, collars and buttons; how to adapt old, misshapen or over-sized garments, and how to do some basic mending - all shown step by step. This book is a toolkit designed to equip you with all the dressmaking skills you need; it contains 10 inventive projects for you to try your hand at using your pre-loved clothes, and gives you all the knowledge you need to make your own clothes from scratch using the pattern of your choice.

Essential tips and ten quilting projects to build your skills and confidence—from the beloved sewing teacher and British television personality. This book is packed with hints and tips for successful quilting and will walk you through every aspect of your sewing journey. It begins with a section on Sewing Room Essentials: a peek in Debbie’s sewing room, a guide to all the tools and materials you might need, a labelled diagram of a sewing machine, and in-depth sections covering various types of wadding/batting and interfacing, fabrics, and threads. The book contains a comprehensive trouble-shooting section to reassure and guide beginner sewists when they encounter problems, along with a glossary to demystify any unfamiliar terms. The second section, Sewing Room Techniques, covers all the skills you need to know, such as pressing, chain piecing, English paper piecing, different quilting styles, and binding, and explains them step by step. The book features ten projects that build up in difficulty, incorporating the techniques you learn as you go. Start simple with a place mat and then build up your skills as you create an English paper-pieced tote, a baby quilt, and a clutch bag. This is the ideal book for the beginner sewist looking for in-depth and helpful guidance, or for the more experienced sewist looking to brush up on their skills—from the woman named “Sewing Designer of the Year” in the Immediate Media British Craft Awards.

The dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961, was one of the longest and bloodiest in Latin American history. The Dictator’s Seduction is a cultural history of the Trujillo regime as it was experienced in the capital city of Santo Domingo. Focusing on everyday forms of state domination, Lauren Derby describes how the regime infiltrated civil society by fashioning a “vernacular politics” based on popular idioms of masculinity and fantasies of race and class mobility. Derby argues that the most pernicious aspect of the dictatorship was how it appropriated quotidian practices such as gossip and gift exchange, leaving almost no place for Dominicans to hide or resist. Drawing on previously untapped documents in the Trujillo National Archives and interviews with Dominicans who recall life under the dictator, Derby emphasizes the role that public ritual played in Trujillo’s exercise of power. His regime included the people in affairs of state on a massive scale as never before. Derby pays particular attention to how events and projects were received by the public as she analyzes parades and rallies, the rebuilding of Santo Domingo following a major hurricane, and the staging of a year-long celebration marking the twenty-fifth year of Trujillo’s regime. She looks at representations of Trujillo, exploring how claims that he embodied the popular barrio antihero the tíguere (tiger) stoked a fantasy of upward mobility and how a rumor that he had a personal guardian angel suggested he was uniquely protected from his enemies. The Dictator’s Seduction sheds new light on the cultural contrivances of autocratic power.

This authoritative catalogue of the Corcoran Gallery of Art's renowned collection of pre-1945 American paintings will greatly enhance scholarly and public understanding of one of the finest and most important collections of historic American art in the world. Composed of more than 600 objects dating from 1740 to 1945.