Friday, March 30, 2007

Japanese Embroidery Books

The blogging world is pretty amazing. I 'discovered' it back in the fall when I was in the habit of google-ing 'persephone books' to find other lovers of this wonderful publisher. I came across blogs and whole new world, of other book lovers, cooks, photographers, and crafters. I had no idea any of this existed. I went from link to link discovering and ultimately deciding to put a little bit of my life into a blog. Discovering all these new people, books, ideas, passions has been fascinating and a result of this is I've found all sorts of new ways to spend my money.

This leads me back to Japanese crafting books. I had no idea Japan had such a big industry in crafting. The books and patterns I have seen are so creative and beautiful. I've been doing embroidery for a short time, maybe around one year and I've mostly used patterns from Jenny Hart's Sublime Stitching. I'm a traditional girl, though, and some of her patterns are a bit too edgy for me. I've found this seller on ebay, though and she sells loads of Japanese crafting books including a selection of embroidery ones. I've purchased this one and this one. I love the patterns in these books - they are very small which I think suits the Japanese aesthetic but are quite detailed. The images of the finished embroidery are so inspiring to me . The only downside of these books is that the images do not iron-on and I expect that hand transferring these patterns is going to be a challenge.

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