Paperback Book

Transform your wardrobe with this step-by-step guide to sewing pockets into your favorite clothes. With simple instructions and line drawings, this book teaches six basic pockets, with suggested alterations to customize each pocket to your wardrobe needs, while learning the history of what pockets looked like and why they remain a political tool today. All the projects are designed for beginner sewists, and most can be made by hand, with no specialty tools or machine required.

For every pair of pants with the pockets sewn shut, for every skirt with nowhere to put your hands, for every jacket missing a place to put your cash, there is one dress with pockets big enough to hold your entire world. Finding that one feels like finding a lucky clover among the grass. But clothes with pockets should not be so rare. There are reasons why (spoiler alert: it’s about patriarchy and capitalism!), and this book will teach you some of the history of fashion and politics, but more importantly, this book will teach you how to fix the problem yourself. With the skills in this book, you can make your old clothes useful again. This book is for sewists who don’t always have the time and energy to make a whole garment, and it’s also for those beginners who have never used a needle and thread. This book is for people who aren’t satisfied with clothes as they are and want to make a change. Most of all, this book is for everyone, because everyone deserves pockets.

Designed + Produced in Portland, Oregon
* Woman Owned Business

Portland's most colorful, authentic, and empowering publishing house and distributor, Microcosm Publishing equips readers to make positive changes in their lives and in the world around them. Microcosm emphasizes skill-building, showing hidden histories, and fostering creativity through challenging conventional publishing wisdom with books and zines about DIY skills, food, bicycling, gender, self-care, and social justice.Microcosm has lived in milk crates, in closets, in a mud room, in a windowless basement, in a church, and under a desk at a major credit card company. We've brought our brightly colored books to infoshops, zine fests, media summits, bicycle conferences, parks, street corners, house shows, dirty bars, all­night coffeeshops, art museums, and every corner of the mainstream where we can clear away a little space to set up shop. We set out to save ourselves from not caring, but out there in the margins we've found communities worth always doing it better for. Now we have contracts instead of handshakes, a warehouse instead of a fanny pack full of zines. We have a staff, we have relationships in the industry that send our books to places we wouldn't have dreamed we could walk into ourselves. We're not as drunk or dirty as we used to be. But still, at heart, we've got this milk crate strapped to the back of a bike and we're riding wildly across town to hand you the book that might just be the one that saves your life!