annieb123's Review of 30 Day Challenge: Embroidery (30-Day Craft Challenge)

by Jessica Anderson

Challenge yourself to learn dozens of embroidery stitches and use them to create 30 simple projects that are ready to display.

If you’ve always wanted to learn embroidery but haven’t known where to start, 30-Day Challenge: Embroidery is the perfect way to jump-start your creativity and get stitching. Even if you’ve never picked up a needle, you will quickly learn everything you need to know to master embroidery.

After an overview of embroidery basics, author Jessica Anderson (Cutesy Crafts) shows you how to create—each day for 30 days—one new stitch and one embroidery design that features that stitch. The easy-to-follow projects include a variety of popular modern motifs such as flowers, birds, houseplants, rainbows, and more, and only take an hour or two, or less, to complete. As the book progresses, you will strengthen your skills with designs that combine multiple stitches.

You can do one project per day in order or follow your own schedule and pick and choose. By the time you’ve stitched your way through the book, you will have an amazing collection of embroidery designs to hang up and display your skill and creativity.

This complete course in embroidery includes:

Everything you need to know to gather supplies, set up your hoops, and prep your threads and needles
30 essential and more-unusual embroidery stitches clearly shown in step-by-step illustrations
30 simple modern embroidery designs you can complete in an hour or two
Easy-to-transfer templates of all the designs are printed in the book and downloadable
Tips for finishing and showing off your hoops
Ideas for embellishing tote bags, jewelry, and more with the embroidery designs
Two bonus challenge projects to stretch your newfound skills

Embroidery is one of the most popular and versatile crafts and is ideal for beginners. It’s affordable, can be done almost anywhere, and doesn’t require years of practice to achieve great results. If you’re new to embroidery or want to learn new stitches and expand your repertoire, 30-Day Challenge: Embroidery will give you the inspiration and know-how you need to take joy in this lifelong skill and creative endeavor.

Originally posted on my blog Nonstop Reader.

The 30-Day Embroidery Challenge is an appealing and well laid-out embroidery tutorial manual by Jessica Anderson. Due out 30th Jan 2024 from Quarto on their Quarry imprint, it's 128 pages and will be available in paperback and ebook formats. This is a sister volume in the 30 Day Challenge series from the same publisher with other habit tracking and creativity prompts.

This guide presupposes no prior knowledge of embroidery on the part of readers. She has included a short pictorial intro for tools and materials as well as how to get started with the challenge. There are many (many!) online resources and youtube as well for readers who are starting without any support network, which can help a lot. She covers very basic supplies as well as transferring designs and tension hoops, etc.

The following chapters include 30 project tutorials including a new stitch-per-day. All the projects are small and very colorful. The author has included 2 bonus projects at the end which combine some of the earlier techniques and stitches and are slightly more complex and will take longer than a day to complete. There is no index included, but the table of contents includes a thumbnail gallery of color photos of the projects with page numbers. Full size templates are included in the book, along with a QR code to download the templates and additional materials electronically.

It should be noted that this book is about surface embroidery, not cross stitch. It's lovely to see tutorials and and upswing in interest for the other fibrearts; it seems like only cross-stitch had any following for a long long time and it's nice to see surface embroidery enjoying a renaissance.

Wonderful skill building tutorials. Four and a half stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

Reading updates

17 January, 2024: Started reading

17 January, 2024: Finished reading

17 January, 2024: Reviewed