Customer Reviews

Freestyle Machine Embroidery

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Carol Shinn is a master at freestyle machine embroidery and shares her techniques and methods for creating beautiful works of art with thread. Beginning with an overview to help the reader understand the process she moves into color mixing and how layering threads and understanding gradation can add depth, interest and complexity to your finished pieces. Then she takes you step by step through her process for creating a piece starting with choosing a subject right through to presenting and framing the finished piece. Clear close up photos of the steps make it easy to understand and follow the written directions and makes this book an invaluable resource for anyone wanting to explore or expand their knowledge of the techniques in this book. You'll find it hard not to be inspired by the wonderful clear color photos of Carol's work that appear throughout the book. This book is an outstanding guide to the art of freestyle machine embroidery. Highly recommended.

Very inspirational - Great examples of the author but also wonderful nice wide variety of work by other excellent fiber artists. Examples are clear, lots of detail photos that actual show the fine detail. Instructional sketches are also very clear. Lots of specific problem solving technique

I have long admired Carol Shinn's work and was excited to find such a clear and informative book showing her work and methods. The book is all that was promised and more. The photographs are very good and clearly show how Ms Shinn accompishes her wonderful thread paintings. There are excellent examples of other artists' work in this medium and the instructions are concise and thorough. It was also helpful to find that Ms Shinn's methods do not require any high tech sewing machines or specialized equipment. She also gives very good instructions about correcting the problems that might arise while working on fabric. I appreciate good books that deliver what is promised and this one certainly does.

This is threadwork as an artform by itself, not as an additional facet of textile or mixed media art. Many of the pieces and techniques discussed in Carol's book would need thousands of yards of thread to make. She explains clearly how to stitch over a transferred image, and what effect direction of stitching will have. She also shows some great examples of colour blending. There is a gallery of mostly abstract work by other artists in thread. The subtitle tells you what the book is providing - both techniques and inspiration.

While looking through my many needlecraft magazines, I came upon a project done by Carol Shinn that I thought was amazing, so I was delighted to see that she had published a book on her techniques. I have been looking for quite a while for a book that showed how to do freestyle machine embroidery which is not the same as doing machine embroidery using digitized designs. With freestyle machine embroidery, you use your sewing machine as a paint brush and thread as the paint, sewing down layers of color to make a picture or design.

In my quest I have come upon books that while supposedly about this type of embroidery, spend half the book talking about painting backgrounds, etc. Well if I could paint backgrounds I think I would stick with painting and forget trying to learn how to machine embroider the picture. This book, however, explains some simple projects that you can do with painting blocks of color (or you could print the blocks out using special ink jet photo transfer paper) and then explains how to use your threads to sew out these simple designs. Once you have learned these simple techniques then you go on to learn how to show transparency of colors in your designs. There are plenty of pictures so that you can understand the step by step process including showing the blocks and the spools of thread used in the project and how they combined.

The author explains the materials she uses and the whys of what she uses and at the same time going on to describe other material that can be used and how you would need to stabilize it. She also spends time on explaining how a design can distort due to the quantity of thread taking up fabric depending on the way the stitches lie. This is the first I recall hearing about the possibilities of distortion from all the books I have read on freestyle machine embroidery in so it was certainly good to know. Along with her own work she shows examples of other artists and explains their basic techniques and philosophy about what they do.

At the back of the book was a page of recommended reading with a long list of books that I hadn't heard of. I think my wish list will be expanding if I can't find the books through my local library. All in all this was a terrific book and one I highly recommend if you are interested at all in this sewing technique. Perhaps after reading this book, I will now be able to go back to my other books on machine embroidery and understand the techniques for combining the thread better.

This is a wondrous book with many examples of finished pieces that are breathtaking. Yet the actual instructions of how to do this kind of embroidery are limited to just twenty pages of the book. The remaining pages are a gallery with no instructions, a useful colour section on overlaying threads and a few techniques and tips. I would rather have seen more instructions on how to make a face in machine embroidery, how to make a 'landscape'. I do think this book is worthwhile because it is inspiring and shows you what can be achieved, but I am not at all sure that it is the best instructional book on freestyle machine embroidery.

Great ideas on how to create wonderful surface designs on fabric.
Great for thread painting.
Would recommend.

This book is a great starter book for learning freestyle embroidery. Carol writes in a straight forward manner providing you with step-by-step instructions that are easy to comprehend and follow. There are photographs to provide you with visuals that follow along with the written instructions. There are also images of completed projects in full view and up-close to show details of techniques. The only downside is that I am a more contemporary artist and the images are more fiber art focused.

This is one of the best well executed books on machine embroidery. It leads you to explore your work in a very secure way.

This book is worth every penny. There are some gorgeous examples and easy looking instructions.