Beginner's Guide to Needlecrafts
2 total works
Combining her love of gardens and landscapes with her skills as an artist and a machine embroiderer, Alison Holt shows you how to create exquisite flower pictures using your sewing machine. Alison's interpretations of what she sees in nature are so detailed that many people at first mistake her embroideries for paintings or even photographs. Alison's technique is to use her sewing machine like a paintbrush to apply threads in a myriad of different colours on to a canvas of hand-painted silk. She uses two basic stitches - straight stitch and zigzag stitch - to make fine and broad 'brushstrokes', blending both to achieve stunning results.
This comprehensive and colourful book covers everything from composing a picture and setting up the machine to choosing threads and silk paints and creating different effects in stitch. Each of the three step-by-step projects allow you to put all you have learnt into practice to make a stunningly effective embroidered picture, and will inspire you to transform what you see around you into your own, unique designs.
Many people at first mistake Alison Holt's embroideries for paintings or even photographs. She is fascinated by gardens, landscapes and detail and enjoys the challenge of interpreting all the elements she sees in nature. Alison's way of working has evolved into a technique of painting with threads on to a canvas of hand-painted silk. She uses two basic stitches - straight stitch in various combinations and zigzag stitch - to make fine and broad brushstrokes on silk, blending both to achieve stunning results. The raised embroidery on the glowing coloured background produces a beautiful three-dimensional effect. This comprehensive and colourful book covers everything from composing a landscape and setting up the machine to choosing threads and silk dyes and framing up. Alison encourages the reader to experiment with the techniques as they go along, making sure the colour, length and direction of stitch are right for the effect they are trying to recreate. Step-by-step demonstrations of an autumn river bank and colourful flower border are included as are many examples of Alison's inspiring and original work.