Secret Garden Embroidery

Stitch your very own horticultural haven with What Delilah Did. Step into Miranda Merriweather’s magnificent secret garden, where lucky clovers grow in spades and the towering tulips reach six feet tall. This whimsical collection of botanical-inspired needlework projects will take you from budding novice to confident stitcher as you explore a variety of simple counted embroidery techniques. Bursting with colour and filled with designs to suit a range of abilities, you needn’t be green-fingered to recreate a slice of this magical rural retreat in your own home. Keep your eyes open for beautiful Lacewing Butterflies, Arbour Alphabet Flags, a super-sweet Milk and Honey Bee and a naughty little Early Bird called Gerald who is guaranteed to brighten up your summer. Projects are design-led, practical and colourful, and many can be completed within a weekend. The style is light and folksy but still retains What Delilah Did's signature pared-down and stylish aesthetic. Materials are high quality, with an emphasis on texture and sophisticated colours. Florals play a large part, but are beautiful and modern rather than flouncy, ranging from folky to botanical in style.

Stumpwork is a highly decorative and imaginative embroidery technique, which typically uses raised and padded stitches that are rich in texture. This practical book explains how to create your own piece of stumpwork embroidery. Beginning with an introduction to the appropriate materials, equipment and tools, it instructs on a wide range of stitches and techniques, and illustrates them with ten delightful projects. It then explains how to design your own piece of stumpwork before advising on finishing, presenting and caring for you work. Written by a leading embroiderer, this beautiful book will inspire and encourage you to try this exciting technique and create your own exquisite designs. Contents include: Practical advice on working with threads, as well as how to stretch and prepare fabrics; Over 900 photographs to guide the reader through a wide range of decorative and raised stitches; Detailed instructions on combining stumpwork with a range of other techniques to create unique designs; Ten projects show how to use the stitches in designs, including stumpwork human figures. This practical guide will be of great interest to embroiderers, designers, theatre designers, interior designers and historians, and is beautifully illustrated with 983 colour photographs.

Whimsical, beautiful embroidery motifs created by an avid gardener—stitch roses, bees, or whole garden scenes. Kazuko Aoki has a unique talent for translating the beauty of the garden with needle and thread. By offering forty motifs, Aoki invites us to explore her gardens through embroidery. The forty motifs explore the roses and wildflowers that appear season to season, as well as the bees and butterflies that enjoy their nectar. The designs here are exquisite, detailed, and artfullly rendered. Beyond the motifs themselves, Aoki also presents projects that feature the embroidery: brooches, notebook covers, pin cushions, and pouches. For those new to embroidery, detailed how-to illustrations are included.

A memorable book about making a renowned garden work In Embroidered Ground: Revisiting the Garden, the acclaimed author and garden designer Page Dickey writes of the pitfalls, challenges, successes, and myriad pleasures of the twenty-nineyear-long process of creating her own remarkable garden, Duck Hill, in upstate New York. This winning book details the evolution of one especially loved and cared-for space: its failed schemes and realized dreams, and the wisdom gained in contending with an ever evolving work of art. The author shares her very personal views on what contributes to a garden's success—structure, fragrance, the play of light and shadow, patterns and textures, multiseasonal plants. She writes of gardening with a husband, with wildlife, with dogs and chickens. And she grapples with how to adapt her garden—as we can adapt ours—to change in the years ahead.

A sampler is a project made from a "sampling" of different stitches or different motifs. Once the learning tool that helped generations of girls master basic needlework skills, this traditional project is still a great way to learn and practice embroidery skills—as well as a creative way to add color to a room or a fabric item. • Covers samplers in several different styles: cross-stitch, counted thread, surface, and freestyle embroidery • Creative uses for sampler art beyond the basic wall hanging: gift bags, ornaments, scarves, tote bags, and more • Includes a how-to section with step-by-step instructions for basic embroidery stitches and sewing skills • 16 projects for decorative sampler designs plus creative variations • A NeedleKnowledge® Book

Learn how to embroider all the components of a country garden and then use this knowledge to create six exciting projects to keep. Experienced embroidery teacher Lorna Bateman is passionate about teaching and about nature. This book will appeal to and inspire both beginner embroiderers as well as more accomplished students. Learn from Lorna how to create beautiful flower designs, using raised and textured stitches to recreate your own idyllic English country garden. The book will walk you through a variety of stitches, how to embroider individual flowers from them and how to incorporate these into an original garden motif. For the nature enthusiast there is plenty to get excited about - an A-Z of English garden flowers and how to stitch them; a section on stitching common garden insects; and how to embroider iconic garden imagery such as birdbaths or garden ornaments. There are six elaborate and practical projects to stitch: needlecase, scissorkeeper, pincushion, thimblepip, glasses case, thread storer, and these make great keepsakes as well as gifts. The book also features a full-size pattern insert for making a vintage bag in which to keep the individual projects. Embroidered Country Gardens is peppered throughout with seeds of wisdom: invaluable hints and tips from the author to help you develop your own skills and unique style. As well as step-by-step instructions, there are also detailed photographs, outline template drawings and a fully illustrated stitch directory.

*Shortlisted for the Aurora Award for Best Novel* ‘Spellbinding’ JJA Harwood ‘An entertaining and dark read’ Stylist ‘An absorbing novel’ Guardian ‘Beautifully written’ Elizabeth Chadwick

A collection of stylish cross stitch designs where Thea Gouverneur invites stitchers to share her passion by copying the natural beauty of well-loved flowers through the art of the needle. Her fresh style is charcteristic of European designs.