Customer Reviews

Helen Philipps' Cross Stitch Garden Notebook: With Ideas for Using Charms and Buttons to Enhance Your Cross Stitch Embroidery

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For those who love both cross stitch and gardening this is the book. As I looked through it I felt like I was really in some country garden. It includes 7 chapters: the cottage garden,kitchen garden,herbal garden, formal garden,birds and bees, fruit orchard and a garden alphabet. There are lots of garden samplers,some which include recipes,an apple orchard a potting shed and many others ; all are quite charming and rustic.The hundreds of small beautiful motifs include: vegetables,seed packets, bird houses,herbs, flowers and flowerpots. The designs and projects are small , quite simple and not time consuming :pincushions,bookmarks,cards,etc... but the motifs can be used collectively to create a bigger project because they all work so well together.It also shows how the creative use of buttons,charms and beads can really liven up one's piece of art.The book has a very good layout, the little watercolor drawings on every page enhance the beauty of this book.

A truly wonderful book for cross stitch lovers. The motifs are easy to stitch. The graphs are also easy to follow.

Helen Philipps has a unique flair for country style combined with contemporary, bold color mixes. She also combines mixed media in her pieces, making unusual buttons, beads and themes work to develope a unique result that is hers and hers alone. But this book focuses on gardens and is beautiful. It's simple but not simplistic. Lots of unique garden layouts and unusual samplers. There are single motifs, gift pieces, full scale pieces and designs combining multiple motifs, samplers combining structures with unusual gardens and more. This is a feast; some of Helen's best ideas. I am greatly enjoying my copy and look forward to getting her other book.