Behind the Seams The Shaeffer Collection Volume One CHANEL

It's gorgeous and worth the money and if you have any interest in couture sewing it's a must have in your library. The close up pictures from David Page Coffin are excellent and a pretty good substitute for seeing and handling the jackets in person. I have a few nit picking issues with the format, but maybe that's just me. When I first played the cd I didn't notice that at the bottom of the main picture are two buttons Show Text Hide Text. They are white on white and in some of the pictures the text is showing when you open that page, in others it isn't. One of my first complaints was that there wasn't enough text and then I discovered the buttons. I'd still like more text and information than she gives, but when I get my copy of her Couture book I think that this cd will be a great complement to it. I haven't taken in it out of the library in a while, but it seems that most of what I wanted to know when I saw the pictures, like how do I construct what I am seeing, is in the book. Since this is Volume One, I assume that a volume 2 is in the works. One nice part of the cd book experience is being able to zoom in on details and the resolution is good enough to get really close. The bad part of this is when you've zoomed in and want to get to another part of the page, you often get the next page instead and there is no zoom out function. In fact the Zoom button didn't work totally for me. You can zoom in with the percentage button on the tool bar, but that's cumbersome to some degree.
One of my favorite things in this book are the detailed construction pictures. There are some wonderful ideas on contruction, especially in the blouses and skirts that she shows. There are some pictures of skirts where the plaid is not symetrical at the waist, showing how they dealt with uneven hips. The blouses, which remember were meant to be tucked in, are all longer in the back. No pulling out when you sit down in these blouses!

$40 may seem like a lot, but if this were available in a coffee table book by one of the art presses it would easily be $75 or more. The minimal text is a negative, but it is still worth having and I know that I will go back to this many times.