Weekend Review: Birth Flower Embroidery

 

Birth Flower Embroidery / Amy L. Frazer
Beverly MA: Walter Foster Publishing, c2025.
128 p.

It's National Embroidery Month! I'm celebrating by trying to finish up at least one in-progress stitching project so that I can share it with you this month, and by sharing some of the embroidery books I've been reading lately. 

The first one is Birth Flower Embroidery - I found this in my library collection and thought I'd take a look. It's a great choice for the start of the year, as you can then plan ahead to stitch projects using someone's birthday flower -- unless their birthday is in January, then they will have to wait until next year ;) 

I thought this was a cute project book. The author gives an intro about the longish history of birth month flowers, and how there are at least two traditional ones for each month and sometimes even three. This means that there are 26 floral designs in the book, plus some extras at the end if you want to add some little bugs, worms or the like to your greenery! 

Each flower has a nice design, using different stitches, often in a spray so that the image is bigger and more visually interesting. Each one is shown completed, and then there is a chart of colours and stitches used for each design. She has included a glossary at the start of the book explaining her acronyms for the stitches she uses, and states that she is using DMC exclusively so those are the colour numbers included. (but you can find a conversion chart online fairly easily if you use another brand). 

The images are made for entry level stitchers - not too hard but challenging enough to keep you interested. Those newer to embroidery would learn some new stitches through the projects; while many are simple backstitch or satin, there are also a few more unusual stitches included. Instructions are pretty clear for each project. 

Projects are shown completed in the hoop and there aren't project instructions for other kinds of things, but there are suggestions as to how you might incorporate these patterns into other items than hoop art. 

The stitching examples and techniques are rough and modern; the author is an artist who uses stitch like painting, so the fine techniques of advanced embroidery aren't the goal here. They are designed to show the hand of the maker & to be fairly quick to stitch. 

The one quibble I had with it is her use of stem stitch. It's one of my favourite stitches for how fluid it can look, especially in lettering. I find her technique makes it visually choppy and it doesn't really look like a stem stitch in some projects, at least to me. But that's one small thing. Otherwise I thought this was a quick read, a creative guide to some ideas about personalizing embroidery projects, and I can see it being helpful in a variety of ways.