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If you are looking for a comprehensive
guide to taking up freestyle hand embroidery, then this is
a good place to start. You can find out what you need to buy
in order to start embroidering, learn from diagrams of the
stitches you really need to know, look at samples of finished
work, get ideas for projects and choose from over sixty different
embroidery transfers.
This is a lot for one book to deliver but it does, helpfully
debunking the myth that you need to know a lot of stitches
or buy a lot of pricey supplies in order to do any embroidery.
You don’t need to buy much or even learn many stitches
in order to stitch all the transfers, and there are also useful
guides to using a hoop and transferring the transfers, which
you can use more than once. Every motif has a page showing
the design worked with a key to stitches and DMC threads.
These are described as samplers and are all worked on white
cotton cloth for clarity. Following this section is a shorter
one of projects, but these do not come with instructions and
would be better described as inspiration. There are photographs
of garments, pillows, an apron, tablecloth and table runner
plus a page of advice about what you can stitch on and with
apart from 6 stranded floss. The final section contains the
transfers themselves, which all have a romantic theme. Choose
from florals (lots of these), art nouveau, hearts, doves and
more; these are mostly single motifs, but there are a few
border, corner and frame designs. They have all been previously
featured in the Design Library or Design Source books, and
it is interesting to see what can be done with them using
just thread, cloth and a needle. All transfers are printed
in black and can be used up to ten times; a boon especially
if using them for repeats. They are arranged on thirty-two
numbered pages to correspond with the stitched samples and
vary in size from under 3” to whole page motifs. This
is the third entry in the series after flowers and borders
and motifs, and I look forward to more titles.
If you cannot find a good range of embroidery materials locally,
try www.searchpress.com
for a list of suppliers.
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