Stitched Blooms Blog Tour & Giveaway

My embroidery friend Carina has a book out soon (early October) called Stitched Blooms and I'm very happy to take part in the Stitched Blooms blog tour!* Stitched Blooms has 300 floral motifs to embroider: floral borders and corners, folk art flowers, leaves, nature's blooms etc etc. all in Carina's admirable signature style. A lovely alliance of pretty colour combinations and Scandinavian folk design.

In addition to the motifs, the book also features 20 projects, some require (easy) sewing and in other cases store bought items were embellished with Carina's lovely designs. These will give you lots of ideas of how to use the motifs.

One of my favourite projects is this embroidered duvet cover, so simple and elegant!

And who can resist a Dala horse?

The 'basics' part of the book covers everything you need to start stitching; from information about scissors, hoops and ways to transfer a pattern to an overview of different types of knots to start your embroidery. The stitch glossary includes the basic stitches but also a few others like the Maidenhair stitch (which I happen to like a lot).

Carina shares some great content about the use of colour in this book, with tips on how to explore use of colour in your own embroidery work. For example by getting out of your colour 'comfort zone'. Something I should do more often too!

Stitched Blooms comes with a cd with all the project templates and motifs featured in the book. You can import motifs into an image manipulating program (such as GIMP) change their size, flip them and combine the motifs to make your unique design. The possibilities are endless. I added my daughter's name (lettering is from the program not the cd) and I think this would make a lovely design for a hand stitched personalized gym bag!

I think this book is a great resource of 'scandi' floral motifs for stitchers of all skill levels. The informative 'basics' part of the book makes it an excellent starting point for beginning embroiderers and many stitchers can benefit from the wonderful pages about the use of colour. Find more information about the book, the blog tour, reviews and places to get your copy here.

I'm very happy to be able to share a copy of Stitched Blooms and 7 skeins of fabulous embroidery floss with one of my readers in my Stitched Blooms Giveaway! Leave a comment on this post before the 1st of October 2013 and tell me what item you would love to embellish with Carina's motifs.  Comments are closed, winner will be announced later today 2/10/13 Be sure to leave a 'trail' (e-mail, link to profile with e-mail etc) or check back here on the 2nd of October so I can get in contact with you should you be the lucky winner.

The floss colours the lucky winner receives could be different from those on the photo above but will definitely be among Carina's favourites.  Good luck everyone!




*The publisher Lark Crafts sent me a copy for review and lets me share the book and floss with you.