Window Gardens in Bloom: 25 Hand-Embroidered Flowers in Easy-To-Create Settings

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.