Customer Reviews

Beaded Dimensional Embroidery (Milner Craft Series)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This author is undoubtedly incredibly talented in both her stitching and her ability to share her art through teaching. I particularly loved the extensive diagram layouts for each project. You get a very detailed and step by step breakdown, along with wonderful patterns for her projects. There is no "guessing" involved - and I will be using these templates and patterns in other projects as well - very user friendly to "pull out" certain stitches and details if you want to adapt this to other projects. I highly recommend this as a project book - the stitch glossery in the back of the book is easily understood by anyone with a working knowledge of embroidery stitches. However, if you are a beginner I assume her first book would be a better instruction manual. But the drawings of the stitches are very clear to the specific task at hand and I find them easy to follow. One oversight that I would appreciate being corrected in any further books by this author (and I would buy any further books in a heartbeat with or without this modification!!) is to include resource suppliers for other countries. One thing is certain, this author has a huge fan base in the usa and european countries, I am sure!!!! She is incredibly talented. She gives such precise information as to each project and the supplies, but sources are only for Australian readers. Actually, I think this is something that the publisher should have seen to, in the editing process. It would enable readers to get a quick contact for the supplies needed to start these beautiful projects!!!! Please write more books!!!!! I would be one of a long line I am sure to get any titles by this wonderful woman!!! Thank you for sharing your gift with all of us!!!

The author of this book is clearly a talented designer and embroiderer -- the photos make for nice eye candy. However, after paging through the entire book I couldn't find even one design I liked well enough that I would be willing to make the effort to stitch it, let alone search for and buy all of the supplies needed to reproduce it. If I use this book at all, it will be for inspiration and to learn specific techniques for designing my own pieces.

A major stumbling block if I did want to stitch one of the projects is that each piece requires a goodly quantity of expensive materials. Take the cornucopia, for example. To stitch this you would need to buy, in addition to the silk ground fabric, three types of interfacing, two sizes of beading wire, four colors of fine wool yarn, six colors of silk knitting yarn, one skein of two-ply wool, one skein of lame thread, six colors of Delica beads, and six other types of beads. That's a major outlay (not to mention the time it would take to round up all those supplies) for what appears to be a fairly small object that you would . . . actually I'm not sure what you would do with it. Hang it from something, I guess, because there's a loop on top.

If you're not Australian or British there's a further hurdle since Kaalund yarns, the main threads called for in this book, appear to be most easily found in Australia and England. Also, they appear to be knitting yarns. If, like me, you don't knit, what would you do with all the leftover yarn? And some of the interfacings are listed by Australian brand names - Shapewell (Permashape) and Soluweb - but not otherwise described, which makes it harder to figure out what the U.S. equivalents might be.

On the plus side, the instructions appear to be clear (I haven't actually tried to follow them) and are well illustrated.

This is a wonderful book very inspiring can't wait to get started on some of the projects.