Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #396458 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781863512930
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
Karenplatt.co.uk: Early nineteenth century botanical artist, Frenchman Pierre Joseph Redoute is renowned for his paintings of flowers. These have inspired the embroideries of Trish Burr in this book. Trish takes seventeen paintings and transforms them into beautiful embroideries with great detail and colour. She uses simple stitiches and yet manages to create a complex effect with tone. The book initiates the beginner into creating delightful stitchery with an introduction, basic materials and equipment and the stitches to master to get you off to a good start. A starter project follows to ensure you practice your new-found skills. We then get into the meat of the book, the seventeen projects from Camellia, Rosa, iris, Anemone and many more favourites. Each project gives detailed materials and colours of thread (standard available world-wide). Every aspect of this book is accompanied by crystal clear line drawings and good photographs to guide you through the process. It is a wonderful 96-page book for all lovers of flowers, embroidery and Redoute.

About the Author
Trish Burr is a self-taught embroiderer who hungrily consumes all aspects of this fine craft. Through research and practice she has developed this individual technique of surface embroidery. She particularly admires the works of the French artist P.J. Redoute, whose paintings often grace the walls of many of our homes, and has personally stitched all the projects in this book in the hope that they will be enjoyed by other stitchers globally.

Customer Reviews

Redoute's Finest Flowers in Embroidery
I bought this sight unseen which is unlike me but this surely would cause me to try that again !!! It is a needlework book of a higher level. By that I mean the novice and the expert can do it; only skill improves the work appearance. It is fully creative embroidery. I am making all 17 project designs and developing them into a moire quilt or cushions. The designs are smallish (5" or so ) but can then be incorporated into whatever your heart desires. They are very fast to do with any fabric of your choice for any textile idea you might hae in botanicals.

Detailed instructions, beautiful patterns
Although you can't "Look Inside" this book at Amazon (currently, anyhow), the cover is exactly representative of the projects inside. This is no encyclopedia of a billion stitches, but a book focused tightly upon reproducing Redoute's beautiful botanical prints in "thread painting."

There were several things about this book that stood out for me:

Not the Kitchen Sink
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Trish Burr wisely restricts herself to a relatively few stitches: long-and-short, satin, stem, split, bullion knot, French knot, and perhaps a couple more. They are presented clearly, in diagrams and words (and photos in some cases), and followed by a small sampler. Then come the Redoute projects...

Clear Presentation
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Each flower (there are 17) is presented in the same format:
- First, a large-scale photograph of the stitched piece, along with a list of needles and other materials.
- Then, three line drawings: one for the pattern outlines, one to define which areas are padded or detailed, and one to show color placement.
- Another, smaller photograph on the same page spread as the diagrams
- A verbal explanation gives details on stitching each part of the flower: which stitches, in what order, how many strands.

Ms. Burr writes in her Introduction that she aims for clear illustrations and good explanations, and she has achieved her target admirably. Although the format as I've described it may sound repetitive, I found it refreshing not to have to flip back and forth between pages, searching for color keys or stitch info--and equally refreshing not to have all the directions crammed into one cryptic diagram. (Anyone who has ever struggled to decode the projects in "A to Z of Ribbon Embroidery", for instance, knows what I mean. Sumptuous photos of the projects, but figuring out how to reproduce them is murder.)

Unusual Selection of Subjects
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It's easy to find embroidery books on English flowers, and many of them are truly gorgeous (Helen Stevens' Masterclass series comes to mind), but if you're looking for something different, something... well, something French!, this may be just the thing for you. Instead of pinks and cornflowers and foxgloves, here are lilies and iris and camellias and magnolias. Roses, morning-glories, and a few exotics like amaryllis, bird-of-paradise, and poppy are also represented. Again, the cover illustration gives a good idea of what you'll find inside. It ain't no cottage garden!

Achievable
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All projects are stitched using easily available DMC embroidery floss. None of the stitches are jazzy or difficult. The instructions are so clear that even a relative novice should be able to achieve exciting results. (Again, Helen Stevens comes to mind, but alas, as a counterexample. I love looking at her books, but they have never given me the slightest bit of confidence that I could do work like that.)

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All in all, an excellent book, well worth the money. Bravo, Ms. Burr!

Excellent; Honors Redoute Well, Easy to Use
The book provides all of the information anyone would need to teach themselves to embroider at home. The results are terrific. The author has done a superb job of recreating Redoute's elegant flower portraits. There is a great deal of value packed into this small book. Worth the price