The following embroidery books released in the first half of 2024 offer a variety of patterns and projects for those interested in learning or mastering the craft. All three of these books provide helpful instructions and inspiration that are bound to get you stitching.

Weekend Makes: Embroidery with Buttons (Guild of Master Craftsman, 2024) by Rosemary Drysdale

If you have an overflowing jar or box of buttons, consider adding some of those buttons to your next embroidery project. Rosemary Drysdale shares her ideas for combining buttons with simple, colorful stitches.

Her book details “25 quick and easy projects to make.”  The projects include many hooped designs for hanging art, but my favorites are are more functional: table napkins, needle case, pincushion, and sachets. The hooped designs can certainly be sewn onto gift bags, little pouches, or other projects instead. The possibilities are there for you to discover.

The book starts with the necessary tools and basics of embroidering, including six illustrated pages of basic embroidery stitches.

The Projects section devotes four pages to each cute button and embroidery project, starting with needed supplies and an image of the finished project. Then comes a page of instructions for the project before a helpful final image that labels the stitches, floss count, and button sizes.

Templates for each of the projects are in the back of the book.

This clearly laid out book, with straightforward instructions and close-up photos of the projects, even rates each project by skill level. The book is suitable for beginners and fun for experienced stitchers, too.

Foolproof Freeform Embroidery (C&T, 2024) by Jennifer Clouston

In her fourth book, embroidery and quilting teacher Jennifer Clouston offers plenty of encouragement and inspiring examples for embroidering without a set of instructions or a kit.

She talks about her free-form process and how you can tap into your own creativity to stitch unique designs. The visually pleasing softcover book is well organized into 14 chapters and a gallery of finished needlework. The first four chapters set you up to understand this organic approach. They explain how to mine your stash for supplies, think about color combinations, choose from the many helpful tools and notions, and how to select and prepare the fabric on which to embroider.

“In this book, I will take a few of the most common embroidery stitches and transform them into barely recognizable nuggets of goodness,” Clouston explains. Chapter 5, “Let’s Get Stitching,” details how to create the mostly linear combination of stitches. Every example shown starts with foundation stitches that are then layered with a variety of additional stitches in two, three, and four passes. There’s a helpful page of tips for getting started.

A chapter showing foundation stitches is followed by numerous chapters showing the finished versions of more than 40 stitches. The embroidered examples are made with perle cotton thread, silk ribbon, and beads. But Clouston notes there are many thread options you can try. She mentions several.

You may spend as much time leafing through the finished stitch samples as you do referring to the 14 pages of illustrated instructions to create the stitches.

Foolproof Freeform Embroidery is similar to Clouston’s third book, Foolproof Flower Embroidery (C&T, 2021) in providing stitch options and inspiration. This book may, however, provide the permission you need to explore stitching without a strictly planned design.

This book is suitable for an ambitious beginner to a more experienced embroiderer.

 

Vintage French Needlework (Schiffer Craft, 2024) by Véronique Maillard

This nicely bound, substantial book contains pages and pages of cross stitch alphabet patterns for those who wish to monogram textiles. There are also cross stitch patterns for flowers and borders, all drawn from antique textiles. According to the full book title, there are 300 authentic cross stitch patterns in all.

Early in the book, author Véronique Maillard says that, for legibility, she digitally transcribed the patterns. “The presentation on a grid pattern corresponds exactly to that used in the old catalogs, including some irregularities,” she says  Those differences include some letters that are taller than others. Some alphabets also are missing letters, as they are combined with other letters (W and V, for example).  The gridded patterns provided are large enough to see clearly.

The book is smartly divided into sections based on pattern characteristics: small alphabets, monochromatic alphabets and two-color versions, monochromatic designs and motifs followed by two-color versions, and multicolor designs and motifs. An index of designs by letter height and another of designs by border size is particularly helpful for planning your project, or if you have a linen already prepared for embroidery.

You’ll find a variety of vintage alphabet shapes, sizes, and styles. “Discovering the breadth of these, and continuing to embroider them, is the best way to save the needlecrafts of yesterday,” Maillard says in the book’s introduction.

She devotes a page to fabrics, embroidery floss, and needles to get started with this traditional form of embroidery. Sprinkled throughout the book are photos of finished works using some of the designs, on everything from a child’s bib to sachets.

This book is translated from the French by Rebecca DeWald. It was originally published as Ouvrages de Dames: 300 Grilles de Point de Croix (Flammarion, Paris, 2010).

It is a suitable book for a more experienced embroiderer.

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See these Threads articles and posts to learn more about embroidery:

Embroidery 101: How to Sew 5 Basic Embroidery Stitches

Silk Ribbon Embroidery: 5 More Stitches 

Create Complex Designs with Simple Embroidery Stitches