Punchneedle Embroidery
Dancing Needles
By Pamela Gurney

      Punchneedle embroidery has periodically enjoyed periods of brief popularity in the USA and UK, but with this new book being distributed to a wider market it might well be here to stay this time. On opening it I was amazed at what this underrated type of embroidery can look like in the right hands – stunning and really not hard at all to achieve. Flowers, children’s motifs, animals and abstracts leap off the page of this handsome book and it isn’t even expensive to take up.

       The instructions here are quite exhaustive, which impressed me immensely, illustrated with diagrams and with lots of hints covering most eventualities. Any stand at a craft show can teach a person how to do the basic stitch in a few minutes, but here Pamela Gurney shows how to thread the needle correctly, do reverse stitching and fill in different shaped areas among other things. I guess any book on the topic would tell most of this but this book goes further and tells you how to make your own salt dough for the terracotta pots incorporated in some of the floral pieces, make braids and work with ribbons as well as too many other peripheral things to name here.

      The results are truly stunning and I soon discovered that I only thought I knew how to do punchneedle embroidery – now I really know how to do it properly and am still learning and enjoying it very much. Very highly recommended.

       If you cannot find materials locally try http://www.searchpress.com for a list of suppliers.

Internationally: The author’s own websites http://www.punchneedleembroidery.com and http://www.dancingneedles.com are based in Australia but ship worldwide. Here you can buy some unique items mentioned in this book like the Dancing Ribbon needle.

In the UK: http://www.webstercraft.co.uk/ sells most of the items.