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Crewelwork
Essential Stitch Guides
Royal School of Needlework Series
Jacqui McDonald

Search Press
October 2010/ ISBN 9781844485505
How-To Books/Embroidery


Reviewed by Rachel A Hyde

AMAZON UK

Associated with the 17th century, crewelwork (also known as Jacobean embroidery) depicts lush, exotic-looking fantasy flowers and fantastic beasts in colored wools. It is also well known for looking complex and involved, so here is another useful Royal School of Needlework primer to show you how the magic is worked.

Books that open flat and stay open while you work the examples are a boon to crafters everywhere, and this is one of those, as are all the books in this series. You can learn all about the history of this fascinating embroidery style briefly at the beginning, and discover what you need to amass in order to start stitching. The thing I like most about this series is that it does not teach just the stitches so that you can embark on working kits and patterns, but gets under the skin of the subject to enable you to start designing your own. It does this by showing how the stitches are worked in a series of helpful staged photographs, but then it goes on to show examples of traditional and modern crewelwork and talks about how they are thought out. This approach might appeal more to those who are already proficient in some basic embroidery stitches and know something about designing, but there is nothing like having a go and seeing what happens. This is what the book advocates. I like empowering books like this that really teach a subject from the ground up and get you designing from the start; one for the keeper shelf.

Reviews of other titles in the Royal School of Needlework Series

Blackwork
Silk Shading
Crewelwork
Stumpwork
Bead Embroidery
Appliqué
Raised Embroidery
The RSN Book of Embroidery

UK Reviewer: Rachel Hyde's work can be found in The Bead Magazine, Making Jewellery and www.craftsuprint.com/rachel-a-hyde/

Reviewed 2011
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