At Mr X Stitch we love to review textile art and embroidery books for you. There are so many great books to discover, packed with needlework inspiration and textile techniques, so we dive into each book to find out what’s good, what’s bad and let you know why you should pick it up.
Introduction
Colorful Stitchery: 65 Embroidery Projects to Personalize Your Home by Kristin Nicholas is a great book for anyone who wants to embellish their home decor with needlework. The book has a great variety of embroidery based projects and with illustrations for every stitch, this is a perfect guide for the hands-on homemaker.
About The Author
Kristin Nicholas has written eight books on embroidery and knitting subjects. She loves to use colour within her artwork; this love becomes obvious when we read her books. Colour is seen within her embroidery, knitting, painting and all other subjects she covers. Since 2001 she has been working as an author, book illustrator and product designer.
Who Is This Book Aimed At?
With plenty of advice, this book would be great for would-be embroiderers as well as those with experience. Many of the projects are home based, thus ideal for those who love home interior design. There are options for gifting too, so we can send our loved ones personalised surprises.
Content
Lets begin with the amount of projects this book contains. Look at that, sixty five!
The book begins with the authors short life story. This adds a warmth to the book, so when we look over the projects we connect with the woman who developed them. The book goes on to separate into sections, which works well, but is rather unusual in content – the author Kristin Nicholas has gone out on a limb….lots of pillows and home style here!
As we all will admit, it can be difficult to start projects. The author has this covered within this early part of the book, where she guides us through her first design. This works well as it leads us on to make the projects, as we have gained confidence through reading this section.
The projects themselves are quite unusual and niche. The author has given us a wide range to choose from – note the attention to detail; not just trees, Tuscan trees!
The author gives us more unusual ideas than your average embroidery book, this makes the publication worth a read and purchase. Take this piece as an example – we not only learn the skill of embroidering text onto cloth – we learn Italian Proverbs too!
Photography
Every project has been well illustrated.
We enjoyed observing how Kristin uses her love of colour to personalise the book. This part looking at Crewel Work is illustrated with a one page spread image of the technique along with some information on this area of embroidery.
What Makes The Book Special?
We think this mostly lies within the type of projects published – they are that little bit different and make us smile.
The stitch instructions are also very helpful and enable us to build confidence before we begin the actual projects.
Kristin Nicholas also divulges the tricks we can all learn. She goes into detail in an understandable way. For example this illustration on the subject of threading. It often depends on what we are trying to thread, the type of yarn or floss. The author has this covered, explaining the differences we need to be aware of.
Anything Wrong With The Book?
The book is dedicated towards home style projects, so if you do not own your own home or are not interested in interior design, this may leave you cold.
Conclusion
If you like needlework, Colorful Stitchery: 65 Embroidery Projects to Personalize Your Home by Kristin Nicholas will teach and inspire you to apply embroidery to a wide range of home decor options. It’s easy to understand and before long you will be making lovely domestitchery projects in your home.
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