From Mary Corbet – Needle n Thread – July 2019
If you love floral garden embroidery, especially if you like stitching small motifs that have an exuberant garden feel to them, you’re just going to love this book – Embroidered Country Gardens by Lorna Bateman.
Embroidered Country Gardens is a beautiful book, and it’s a thorough book when it comes to instruction for this type of free-style surface embroidery. The projects in it are all attainable – they’re nothing complicated about any of them, and the instructions are clear and easy to follow.
There’s plenty of scope in the book for personalizing your embroidery projects and making them unique, since the elements in the embroidery can all be combined in myriad ways to create ever-new designs.
I’d say the book is suited to beginners and beyond. While the embroidery is definitely on a small scale, it is all very achievable, very accessible, and very well-explained – and same with all the finishing work on the projects.
I didn’t see any “cons” to the book. It’ll make a beautiful, fun, and attainable addition to your embroidery library, whether for reference or for further project development.
Postcard Reviews July 2019
Lorna Bateman both expertly explains and demonstrates the craft, and her ‘pictures’ come alive in this very very beautiful book. The photography is stunning, and with the addition of templates, you will quickly be able to sew an amazing project. It will be easy to become a master of embroidery with just this one book. Embroidered Country Gardens lists all the tools you will need, it also gives you a comprehensive guide to needles…. if you thought there was only one kind think again!! The stitches are in A -Z order and what I loved was that each stitch is given a visual diagram, a hint and tip box and an easy to understand explanation. There are 12 projects, each one is perfect to practice your stitches and once again comes with specialist advice on getting a professional finish to your work.
This is a must have book, inspired by nature it is quite divine.
5*/5
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