Canvas Work Stitches, Vol 2, Book Review

Square Herringbone Stitch and Florentine Embroidery, Diane Grant, Tandem Books, 2013, 20 (British pounds)

Diane Grant is a fearless embroiderer. As is the case with many British stitchers she incorporates buttons, beads, and paper in her work. She colors her canvases. Unlike many British stitches she puts these techniques to use with more common techniques to create lovely needlepoint projects that are within reach of most stitchers.

That’s what I really loved about this book. She has taken two stitches, neither very hard, and combined them into five lovely projects. Plus she has given us the basics of both stitches, some history, and ideas for creating your own original projects.

Readers are probably familiar with Bargello, but Square Heeringbone is less common. I think of it as a stitch that looks like the God’s Eye decoration. It has that square look, going around crossed lines and often has rounds of different colors.

The book begins with chapter about her own journey, illustrated with large, clear pictures of her work. These are so clear you could stitch from them.

After chapters on historical background and materials, she has three chapters that will help spark your creativity.

The first is on color sources. She shows you how you can take a photo and by using filters and screens in Photoshop create an abstracted, blocky version of the photo to become the source of your needlepoint. In fact she used this method for some of the pieces pictured in the book.

Next comes the samples chapter which is so much more than a few stitches and samples. It not only shows you various versions of the stitches, especially Square Herringbone, it has pictures and charts of several more projects.

Following this is a chapter to help you organize your own project. In it you will find a brief explanation of the process she recommends. This is followed by several examples from her students work with both sources and finished projects.

The delightful projects come next. The book finishes with an excellent chapter on the finishing techniques she uses.

I loved this book. It’s great eye candy and the projects make you want to stitch them as soon ass possible. For North American stitchers her charts and diagrams might be a bit hard to understand at first. In the US our convention for diagrams is to use extremely thin lines for the gird and thicker lines for the stitches. Grant uses a different convention. Her grids always have thick lines, almost as if they were a photo of interlock canvas. They are the colored.

The lines of the stitch diagram are then put on this grid . These lines are thicker and black and other colors. It isn’t hard to follow once you are used to it, but it will be surprising to stitchers who want to stitch the moment the book arrives.

I can’t wait to do some of these projects!

The book is available in her Etsy shop: https://www.etsy.com/shop/canvasworkplus