How to Embroider Almost Every Animal by Applemints

How to Embroider Almost Every Animal (Almost Everything)

by Applemints

How to Embroider Almost Every Animal is an inspiring, fun, and sophisticated collection of 400+ stitch motifs that offer a fresh take on animal-themed embroidery. 
  • Get a detailed checklist of everything you’ll need to embark on your animal stitching adventure, plus step-by-step tutorials for essential stitches and other techniques.
  • Explore 400+ adorable stitch motifs that celebrate animals of every description and from every habitat. In addition to hundreds of fresh motifs for an amazing assortment of animals are animals in scenes—pasture, forest, barnyard, jungle, and more—plus a field guide of motifs for mythical, extinct, and unusual animals as well as animal-themed symbols and icons.
  • Re-create the motifs exactly as shown using the accompanying templates and stitch guides, or give them your own creative spin by changing details and colors to suit your own style and imagination.
How to Embroider Almost Every Animal helps you take your first steps to creating beautiful stitched animals with needle and thread!

Each book in the Almost Everything series offers readers a fun, comprehensive, and charmingly illustrated visual directory of ideas to inspire skill building in their creative endeavors.

Reviewed by annieb123 on

5 of 5 stars

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Originally posted on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

How to Embroider Almost Every Animal is an encyclopedic sourcebook for animal surface embroidery by Applemints (Mieko Sasaki). Due out 2nd March 2021 from Quarto on their Quarry imprint, it's 120 pages & will be available in paperback format.

This will be an oddly formatted book to western audiences. The first 30% of the book is a catalogue of designs (and there are oodles of them!) presented in full color. There is a short gallery of project inspirations after that (4 pages) along with an introduction and general techniques chapter. This chapter covers materials, fabric and thread choices, needles, scissors, tensioning devices (hoops) etc etc.
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.

Anyhow, following the materials and supplies chapter is a really well done tutorial chapter about the different stitches used for the patterns in the book. The step-by-step photos are annotated and accompanied by explanatory text. They're clear and easy to follow.

The final half of the book contains the patterns for the elements listed in the catalogue at the beginning. They are mostly small(ish) elements which can be combined and switched around as desired. There are several animal alphabets as well, for personalization (or monogramming gifts for animal loving friends). Although it's not clear from the cover art, many of the included patterns are for anthropomorphic animals in hats, clothes, dancing ballet, riding bicycles, etc. (Not all, but I would say roughly 10% of the patterns)

I enjoyed the book very much. It's a worthwhile and fun introduction and guide to learning embroidery. Many of the designs in the book could also serve as a good jumping off point for dimensional embroidery/stumpwork.

Four and a half stars

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

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Reading updates

  • Started reading
  • 1 February, 2021: Finished reading
  • 1 February, 2021: Reviewed