The Stitch Starts Here – Book Review

Summer Louise Truswell, Kindle book 2010, $5.49

As is the case with many people, I got a Kindle for Christmas. So did Summer last year. The Kindle prompted her to put together this handy stitch book. I was prompted to buy her book.

If you stitch and have a Kindle, I highly recommend it. For not much more than a skein of yarn, you’ll get stitches, lots of them, in a portable format.

The book has a short introduction, an explanation of how to use a laying tool and then gets down to the business of stitches. Divided into “chapters” by stitch type. Each stitch has one or more diagrams, an explanation, and then a classification.

The diagrams are clear and have arrows, numbers, or both to show you how to stitch them.

I love that Summer’s background in many embroidery techniques broadens our idea of needlepoint stitches to include techniques like pulled work, hardanger, and cutwork. I’m going to incorporate some of these stitches in my own stitching.

I have a couple of small complaints about the book. While overall the diagrams are fantastic on some of them, especially for pulled stitches, the contrast is lower because the grid is lighter. It makes these hard to see in dim lights.

Since I’ve used Kindle’s publishing tool myself, I know that this could be something not seen before it went through the conversion and something that is hard to correct.

The other problem is minor and that is that the text (which isn’t all that much) is not always proofread well. For some stitches I found explanations that went with other stitches and sometimes I found stitches named one thing in the diagram and another in the text. But this does not mar the usefulness of the book.

You can buy it here on Amazon.

I want to add one note for those who might be downloading this book as one of their first Kindle purchases. Pagination is odd on Kindles. It’s that way in every Kindle book I’ve read. The presence of diagrams with text makes it even more odd. Sometimes diagram and text are on one page, sometimes they are on completely different pages and sometime the explanation is split over two pages. In this book there is a “page” break after each stitch that is very helpful. However, the publishing tool does not give the publisher any control over this, correctly so because of the many type sizes which affect this. It’s something we all just have to live with.

Buy this ebook, it’s got great diagrams, plenty of ideas, and is a wonderful price.