Window Gardens in Bloom: 25 Hand-Embroidered Flowers in Easy-To-Create Settings [Illustrated] [Paperback]

Margaret Vant Erve (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2005

Embroidery kits are great, but to express creativity, it's even better to move beyond kits. Window Gardens in Bloom makes it easy for every crafter to design delightful flowering window gardens blossoming with twenty-five different hand-embroidered plants. With instructions for painted or stitched backgrounds plus a stitch directory, this book is blooming fantastic!

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

MARGARET VANT ERVE is a certified teacher with the Embroiderers' Association of Canada, and give workshops across North America. Margaret lives in Ottawa, Canada.

Product Details

• Paperback: 64 pages
• Publisher: C&T Publishing; illustrated edition edition (October 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1571203060
• ISBN-13: 978-1571203069
• Product Dimensions: 10.8 x 8.4 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,788,637 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars great book, several techniqes, good instructions & pictures, September 11, 2008

By 

Sarah Danks "Nana Sarah" (Springdale, PA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Window Gardens in Bloom: 25 Hand-Embroidered Flowers in Easy-To-Create Settings (Paperback)

This is a great book. Margaret has designed 9 vignettes, including the one on the cover, that display embroidered flowers in a window box, on a window sill, or surrounding a front door. Five designs have full-sized patterns that can be photocopied, the other 4 could be created from the photos. There are instructions for 25 flowers and plants and diagrams for over 20 stitches. Nearly every page has one or two "tips," many of the sort that only come from doing it wrong once and learning not to do that again.

What is neat about these designs is that the backgrounds are painted on silk or cotton, and she gives instructions on how to do this to the point that it looks really easy. She covers materials, preparations, heat setting, design transfer, all the things you need, and discusses bricks, stone, stucco, wood siding, and several different window frames. If the idea of painting is intimidating, Margaret points you to all the "architectural" quilting fabrics currently available.

If you need step-by-step, hold my hand instructions, you might not like this book. The instructions are very good, but this is not a book that I would recommend for a novice. However, if you have even a small amount of embroidery experience, I would definitely recommend it, if only for the inspiration it will provide for your to continue work on perfecting your technique.

All in all, this book has good instruction and pictures, tips, and projects that are not your run of the mill embroidery in the middle of a blank piece of fabric. If you don't like any of the specific projects, there is enough information that you could even take a picture of your own window boxes and recreate them in embroidery! I'm very glad to have it in my library.