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Book Review

Book Review

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I thought it would be fun to go through my library of fiber art books and do a review of some of my favorites. I don’t have any other books by Jan Beaney and Jean Littlejohn but I have seen some of their other books. I have to say that I would recommend anything written by them. They are a great team and pack a lot of useful information in their books.

If you click on the photo above it will take you to Amazon. I think the book is out of print because the new copies are really pricey but you can buy them used for less. Or look in your local library, maybe you’ll be lucky enough to find this book. I love this book. I refer back to it frequently and have read it cover to cover at least three times.

The book has two sections the first is “Design to Embroider” and the second is “Stitched Images”.  The first section is about how to develop designs on paper and mixed media, where to look to find ideas and exploring those ideas. It is a good start to basic design and how to relate it to embroidery. The photos and examples are wonderful and inspiring. They show their own work as well as work of other artists.

Section two of the book is about taking your designs and making them into an embroidery. There is information about fabric paints and various methods of using them, working with applique’, stitch themes, machine embroidery and selecting a theme. This book is not a step by step instruction book. It does give basic information about how to use various fabric paint products but it doesn’t contain any projects to follow. The book is geared towards getting you to think about your own designs and how to develop backgrounds and then add stitch to make a complex experimental stitch piece.

The book talks a bit about using different stitches but it is not a stitch dictionary and limited directions for individual hand or machine stitches. What it does is give you lots of ideas about how to interpret designs and various approaches to use to achieve the desired effects. Every time I read the book, I find something new to consider. If you only do traditional embroidery from a kit and don’t want to learn how to design, this book isn’t for you. If you’d like to take a more experimental approach and learn how to design your work, you’ll love this book. All the reviews on Amazon are 5 stars!

If you have a favorite fiber art book, I’d love to hear about it. Hop on over to the forum and  tell us about your favorite book.

Beading & Felting

Beading & Felting

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Beading and Felting

I know there are some spectacular bead artists out there and this week I thought I’d try my hand at some beading, I’ve been following Robin Atkins blog called Bead Lust

http://beadlust.blogspot.com.au/

 Her work is so beautiful. I’ve never really wanted to learn about beading before but since getting into more of the mixed media side of things it’s made me more interested in the beading process, of course not on the scale of Robins though , just enough to try to work into my pieces.  Robin has been beading for a long time and she has written a couple of books, she has now put out her first book as a free book for anyone to read, so since I was following along I thought I’d take the time to read it.  She explains her methods of beading and basically works free hand with no pre conceived ideas, or nothing set in stone.  So having read that I thought I’d give a small piece a go, mind you I don’t have thousands of beads to choose from so I started this little one with one of Zed’s hand made buttons and went from there.

It definitely helped to read her book as I was under the impression that I should have some sort of design in mind before I started, but I actually found it so much easier not to.  This is only a small piece I know but reading her book  gave me the courage to have a go !!

I’ve also made a couple of small note book covers, inspired by Zed once again, and I wanted to  do something else with my flat pieces of felt and not just wall hangings.  The first cut was the hardest I must admit, spending all that time rubbing and rolling the felt only to cut it up in the end. These 2 covers were made with the one piece and then cut in half so I had the 2 different colours in each cover.

I then embellished with embroidery stitches learned from the TAST 2012, so I used Blanket, Fly & Cretan stitches and then added some beads in too.

I did not have any success with creating skeleton leaves so we’ll leave that for another day lol

I hope everyone’s had a productive week and I’d love to hear what you’ve been up to.