Crafty book review!

The New Crewel: Exquisite Designs in Contemporary Embroidery

Several friends recommended this book to me, knowing how much I enjoy embroidery. I finally got a chance to check it out and was pleasantly surprised. I always thought crewel sounded scary and super-difficult. When I was a kid, the crewel kits in the craft store looked beautiful but too complex to try. However, this book does a great job breaking it down into easy and manageable stitches and projects.

It turns out, a lot of crewel is just variations on satin stitch--which I already do tons of in my embroidery. I liked the book's straightforward format and clear instructions.

The sampler is a great way for a crafter new to crewel to try out various stitches or patterns and there were some really beautiful ones of leaves and flowers. There were also a few that reminded me of a bizarre 70's pillowcase from when I was a kid.

Overall, the projects are cute, though I would have liked to see a few "more intense" projects at the end. And the color palette was pretty simple in this book, they could have shown more variety. I guess on both counts they were just trying to keep it simple and "not scary"--I'd say they succeeded.

I would definitely recommend this book for a beginner, or if you're looking for some basic projects to try out.

Happy crafting!