Cross Stitch Splendid Florals

by Marc Saastad

      Liven up your walls with a set of handsome floral studies worked in cross stitch. This slim volume contains all you need (apart from the materials) to produce these four lovely pictures, shown helpfully on the reverse of the book.

The flowers shown are a rose, poppy, tulips and a bearded iris and anybody who has worked a few charts before ought to have no trouble with these patterns. There are no fractional stitches or blends, just thread up and get stitching. Each chart is shown in black and white with symbols. My favorite method as working it and watching it take shape is rather akin to piecing together a jigsaw puzzle. The designer has used a selection of Anchor and DMC threads, an unusual but clever touch which maximises these two rather dissimilar ranges of floss. Layouts are given as to how the pages fit together to form the finished work, and there are even small insets showing the back-stitchedbackstitched outline. This does help with some parts of it which are slightly harder to spot, but to be truly useful these would need to be enlarged quite a bit. Fortunately, the back-stitching is clearly marked on the actual patterns rendering this superfluous. At the back are helpful hints as to what fabric to use, what size the finished work will be depending on what thread count you buy and how to get started. There are diagrams showing the correct working of cross stitches and back-stitches, as well as some other useful things. I couldn’t think of anything else that could have been included, and this would make a wonderful project (or gift) for somebody who is looking for their first big project after working smaller pieces, or who wants to graduate from kits.