Category: books

Review: The Complete Machine Embroidery Manual by Liz Keegan

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Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links meaning if you make purchases from this blog, I get a small commission. However, any recommendations and opinions are my own. For more information, please click here. 

There’s nothing better when you embark on some new crafty journey then buying a good book. While they’re heavy, bulky and completely inconvenient when compared to digital files but I still vastly prefer paper and ink to their digital counterparts. I like it even more when said books prove to be excellent references that you come back to time and time again. When it comes to machine embroidery though, where is the best place to start?

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Review: The Fabric of Civilization – How Textiles Made the World by Virginia Postrel

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This post contains affiliate links meaning if you sign up to the course from this blog, I get a small commission. However, any recommendations and opinions are my own. For more information, please click here. 

Some books manage to demand you read every page of them and this week’s review is for one such text. Fancy figuring out the secrets of Machiavelli’s childhood and how textiles shaped his plays and thinking? Eager to find out just how hard it is to knit a 3D bunny on a machine? Read on – this is the text for you!

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Review: Knitting Yarns by Ann Hood

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Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links meaning if you sign up to the course from this blog, I get a small commission. However, any recommendations and opinions are my own. For more information, please click here. 

What does a knitter like to do when not knitting? Buy yarn, pet yarn, ogle designs, and read books about knitting. Got a knitter you would like to let know you’re thinking of them without entering the minefield of fibre blends, gauges and tools that look like torture devices to the uninitiated? Maybe Ann Hood’s collection of short essays could be just the thing for you…

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Review: This Golden Fleece

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Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links meaning if you make any purchases via these links, I receive a small commission that contributes to the running costs of the blog. However, any recommendations and opinions in this review are my own. For more information, please click here.

I’ve been very much enjoying the number of textile-themed narrative non-fiction books being published lately. From Kassia St Clair’s brilliant offerings, The Golden Thread and The Secret Lives of Colour, through to the exceptional Threads of Life and the still interesting but not entirely my cup of tea, Knitlandia.

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Review: Knitlandia

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Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links meaning if you make any purchases via these links, I receive a small commission that contributes to the running costs of the blog. However, any recommendations and opinions in this review are my own. For more information, please click here.

A book about knitting in the New York Times Bestseller list? Apparently not as outrageous as it sounds. Welcome to ‘Knitlandia: A Knitter Sees the World’, Clara Parkes’s collection of tales of knitting conventions and events across the world.

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Review: Threads of Life

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Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links meaning if you purchase the book through these links, I receive a small commission that contributes to the running costs of the blog. However, any recommendations and opinions in this review are my own. For more information, please click here. 

Art? Handicraft? Women’s work? What is needlework to you? To Clare Hunter, needlework is not just a decorative frivolity but true skilled labour and a means of telling the stories of the individuals, countries and historical periods. To her, the act of sewing is to secure and trap out personal memories in thread and fabric. ‘Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle’ is Clare Hunter’s exploration of the oft-forgotten tales of the accomplished hands that created many different textile pieces, lost and preserved, and the political and social environments surrounding their work.

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Review: Uwagake and Shitagake-Chidori Kagari Temari (手まり上掛け千鳥かがりと下掛け千鳥かがり)

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Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links meaning if you purchase the book through these links, I receive a small commission to help keep running the blog. However, any recommendations and opinions in this review are my own. For more information, please click here. I received a copy of this book as a gift. All images featured are from the book and are the work of the author, Ai Mizuta.

I’ve moved recently and one of the things that this always forces you to confront is quite how much I love books. This isn’t a particularly new realisation to me, I’ve always been a huge fan of novels, short stories or any form of literature, but I have really managed to amass quite a craft book collection over the last few years.

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Review: The Golden Thread

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Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links meaning if you purchase the book through these links, I receive a small commission that contributes to the running costs of the blog. However, any recommendations and opinions in this review are my own. For more information, please click here. 

It was always going to be a challenge to dislike to a book that starts with the sentence ‘I am assuming here, Dear Reader, that you are not naked’. It was also always going to be a challenge to dislike any book that promised an adventure through our textile past, present and future.

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Review: The Secret Lives of Colour

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Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links meaning if you purchase the book through these links, I receive a small commission to help keep running the blog. However, any recommendations and opinions in this review are my own. For more information, please click here. 

For regular readers of the blog, it will come as no surprise when I say I really, really like colours. I like looking at them, playing with them, making them and stumbling upon which combinations come together to make something even more exciting than their constituent parts. It probably also comes as no surprise then, that when I saw Kassia St Clair’s ‘The Secret Lives of Colour’, I felt as though someone had written a book just for me.

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Review: The Embroidery Stitch Bible

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Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links meaning if you make purchases from this blog, I get a small commission. However, any recommendations and opinions are my own. For more information, please click here. 

One of the great things about the spread of the Internet has been the increasing accessibility of information on even the most niche of hobbies. This is great news for crafters for very obvious reasons, but with a growing number of wonderful Youtube tutorials and online stitch tutorials, is there any place left for a hardbound stitch bible?

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