Why Not Embroider Boxes?
By Daphne J Ashby & Jackie Woolsey

       If, like this reviewer, you are untidy, love crafts, and find it hard to organize a lot of small items, then this book is for you. You can indulge your love of working with fabric, doing embroidery and recycling items and make a whole lot of beautiful boxes of the type that have just the right shaped compartments for whatever it is you want to store in them. They make good presents too—and are actually cheap to make!

       This book tells you upfront what you need, and it isn’t a lot. As long as your local art store stocks grayboard (also called strawboard), then you are away. What you cover the boxes with is largely up to you, but there are lots of ideas here, showing how a patterned cotton cloth of the type used for quilt-making can be used and how the motifs can be echoed in embroidery or other surface decoration. There are even some trace-off freestyle motifs and simple instructions for “color through gold” embroidery (the invention of co-author Daphne J Ashby), and lots of helpful line drawings on assembling the boxes themselves. This is not an “instant” technique by any means, and math phobics won’t enjoy the intricate measuring and geometry involved in working out one’s own box patterns, but if you enjoy the figure juggling and all that sort of thing (I do), then it ought to be…great fun! The boxes are truly beautiful and just looking at all those lovely color photos made me want to turn over a new leaf and be tidy. Clear instructions and a fold-flat design to the book make it a useful and hands-on primer. If you don’t know how to do stumpwork, you won’t learn how to in here, so you might want to invest in another book, and if you are an embroidery novice, then this isn’t a primer for learning stitches, but a book for those who know how and want to put their skills to a new use. There are a few stitch diagrams, and I was quite impressed with the section on Caselguidi (a technique I had never heard of before), but I would say that this is one of the experienced stitcher in other fields and none the worse for that. There are lots of beginners’ books on the market. Highly recommended for being a good clear primer on making beautiful boxes.

      If you cannot find the materials locally, try www.searchpress.com for a list of suppliers. There are some addresses in the back of the book, but they are all UK suppliers. My seed beads came from:

http://www.shipwreck-beads.com/ Largest in the world and ships internationally. 600+ page catalog!