Generally, sewing and embroidering are great skills to have and a hobby for most individuals all over the world. However, learning and acquiring embroidery skills is not as easy as normal sewing. But with the right guide to embroidery techniques and equipment, mastering these skills becomes quite easy even to beginners. Embroidery books are one of the best ways to horn your embroidery skills. These books introduce you to multiple embroidery techniques including traditional and contemporary designs, as well as hand embroidery stitches. This article will provide you with the best 20 embroidery books for beginners with embroidery designs and patterns.
20 embroidery books for beginners with embroidery designs and patterns
1. How to Embroider: Techniques and Projects for Beginners by Susie Johns
Are you a beginner in embroidering and want to make your stitches but you don’t have a mentor or teacher? Then this is all that you require to have by your side. How to Embroider is a comprehensive book written by Susie Johns that consists of everything that you require to start embroidering as a beginner. The book consists of an extensive guide consisting of all the materials and tools required for handling any embroidery project, various designs and patterns, and a project for each technique.
It is divided into sections while each section teaches you a single technique and gives you an example of the technique. The stitches and patterns are very clear in the book accompanied by numbered diagrams showing you how to position the needle and thread. The patterns are arranged in ascending order, from the simplest to the toughest. Some of these techniques include outline stitches, blanket stitch, running stitch, and more.
2. Embroidery: A Maker’s Guide by Victoria and Albert Museum
This Embroidery book is designed for those beginners who want to learn embroidery designs and patterns from ancient to today. Embroidery: A Maker’s Guide consists of multiple techniques of varying difficulty, with each having its brief history, cultural usages, and its application with a sample project.
It consists of techniques such as freestyle embroidery, embellishments, counted-thread and canvas work, contemporary embroidery, and more. Embroidery: A Maker’s Guide also consists of awesome pieces and stitches photos for a visual demonstration.
3. A-Z of Embroidery Stitches by Country Bumpkin
The A-Z of Embroidery Stitches book is a comprehensive book consisting of an extensive guide to help beginner embroiderers to sharpen their skills. The book takes you through a wide array of stitches that will help you learn how to make beautiful and intricate patterns and designs.
It contains many different stitches with clear and colorful pictures, as well as the guidelines of each pattern. A unique feature about the A-Z of Embroidery Stitches is the left-handed feature that helps left-handed individuals to learn great embroidery designs. The book also consists of tips for picking fabrics, embroidery hoops, and threads. It has 144 pages.
4. Artfully Embroidered: Motifs and Patterns by Naoko Shimoda
Artfully Embroidered is an embroidery learning book written to help beginners and other embroiderers to make vintage embroidery patterns and designs, as well as bringing these techniques to the modern era. The artfully Embroidered guide contains step by step guidelines for making embroidery designs and patterns, as well as embroidery templates to help learners make the original designs.
For more innovativeness, the book also teaches you how to use embellishments and colors to make the traditional designs have a modern flair. It has 120 pages and is designed mainly for bags, purses, and totes.
5. Embroidered Garden Flowers by Kazuko Aoki
This beautiful embroider’s book is designed to inspire and help embroiderers to learn and try new embroidery patterns and designs. Embroidered Garden Flowers features very clear and sharp photos of embroidered flowers for greater inspiration; the first 47 pages consist of embroidery photos of flowers tended by Kazuko Aoki or has a certain fondness for.
Embroidered Garden Flowers guide has a total of 63 flower varieties, while the stitching instructions and color choice for each flower are located at the back of the book. It also consists of a basic embroidery stitches guide as well as their usages. This book is ideal for all embroiderers, however, it is not beginner-friendly.
6. Modern Folk Embroidery: Folk Art Inspired Designs by Nancy Nicholson
This book provides you with 20 unique designs for folk art inspired embroidery. Modern Folk Embroidery provides you with a guide to help you navigate step by step in making practical and fun decors for your projects, home, and accessories. For easy learning, the book has diagrams that are easy to follow, that help you learn the required stitches for each design. It consists of various designs and patterns that include a pincushion, coaster and table runner, a pinafore, a lampshade, and a tote bag. It has 128 pages and weighs 1.2 pounds.
Nancy Nicholson has a degree in Arts and Crafts and is well-known for her folk art inspired embroidery designs and patterns talent.
7. Royal School of Needlework: Book of Embroidery
This is one of the most comprehensive and extensive books for embroidery, hence, rest assured of getting everything you need to know about most embroidery techniques. The RSN: Book of Embroidery is a 400-page encyclopedic tome consisting of more than 2,000 embroidery photos and descriptions. This book is a collection of eight embroidery books obtained from the Essential Stitch Guide series and then arranged into new well-detailed sections.
The techniques contained in this book include blackwork, crewelwork, silk shading, canvas work, whitework, stumpwork, goldwork, and bead embroidery. Each technique is well described in its section, while the section consists of a comprehensive history, required tools and materials, main stitches, how to make a design, and project suggestions.
8. Doodle Stitching: Fresh & Fun Embroidery for Beginners by Aimee Ray
Doodle Stitching is a beginner-friendly embroidery book featuring basic stitches with easy to follow steps at the beginning. This embroidery book is also well-detailed, that also covers the types of floss, materials, fancy threads, and needles. It also explains the various styles for appliques, outlining, filling, and tips for decorating.
Doodle Stitching embroidery guide provides you with a vast array of patterns and colored illustrations for the easy creation of beautiful designs. Some of the designs include lampshades, scarves, shoes, pillowcases, and more. It has 128 pages, with a dimension of 8.8 x 9 x 0.2 inches and a weight of 1.1 pounds.
9. Embroidery by DK
This Embroidery book is an easy-to-read and easily understood guide, with detailed instructions on the steps of embroidering different types of designs and patterns, accompanied by clear photos for better understanding. It consists of 160 pages of detailed illustrations on various techniques for creating embroidery stitches, sewing clothes, and doing needlepoint.
The Embroidery guide features 200 stitches together with their step by step instructions, as well as their usage ideas for easy application. It is ideal for types of embroiderers as the designs vary in level of difficulty, hence ideal for both beginners and skilled.
10. The Embroidery Book: Visual Resource of Color & Design by Christen Brown
The Embroidery Book by Christen Brown is an embroidery guide that takes you through the embroidery art step by step, from the introduction to the projects. This book introduces and shows you a total of 149 embroidery stitches, as well as various seam techniques for perfecting your embroidery projects. For your extra advantage, it also provides you with a guide for choosing the right silk ribbons, color threads, buttons, and beads for your projects.
Unlike other books, this book provides you with both traditional and contemporary designs and patterns. It also includes beautiful quilt photos for better learning. It has 160 pages and a weight of 1.2 pounds.
11. The Sewing Machine Embroiderer’s Bible by Liz Keegan
Embroiderer’s Bible is another book designed to help beginners to horn their skills and take their projects to another level. Generally, there are multiple embroidery designs available, this bible provides you as an embroiderer with the differences between them for easy learning.
Also, it shows you what you need to sew the various designs on your machine, thereby teaching you how to tackle various projects. The 128-page Embroiderer’s Bible also contains multiple tips on selecting needles, stabilizing material, and threads. This book helps you to do your level best on each embroidery project.
12. Embroidery: A Beginner’s Step by Step Guide to Stitches and Techniques by Charlotte Gerlings
This step-by-step guide is designed for beginners as well as other embroiderers wishing to refresh or enhance their skills. This comprehensive guide consists of basic stitch diagrams used in embroidery and their descriptions, as well as the necessary techniques that you will encounter on your way. The Embroidery Guide to Stitches and Techniques by Charlotte Gerlings also contains several photos of completed projects to help you range your skills.
13. The Embroidery Stitch Bible by Betty Barnden
The Embroidery Stitch Bible is an extensive embroidery book consisting of 256 pages meant to help you horn your embroidery skills. The book consists of completely explained and illustrated stitches and full-sized embroidery samples, as well as the various application of each stitch. For clear understanding and removing confusion, this embroidery book provides you with the working notes and alternative names for the methods. Also, the extensive guide takes you through selecting the appropriate equipment and materials for various designs, not forgetting the basic tips for all the techniques.
14. Embroidery and Crazy Quilt by Judith Baker Montano
Embroidery and Crazy Quilt is written by Judith who is a fabric artist covering a variety of traditions and styles. This book features a spiral-bound design to allow it to stand upright on the table and flip it, for easy reading and follow-up as you work on your projects on the machine. The Embroidery and Crazy Quilt book contain multiple stitching techniques for individuals who are right-handed and left-handed altogether. This makes it ideal for all embroiderers, despite your favorite hand. It has more than 180 stitches to enhance your embroidery skills and several completed projects for cross-referencing.
15. Mary Thomas’s Dictionary of Embroidery Stitches
This is a great embroidery book with a great reputation for enhancing embroidery to all embroiderers of all levels. The book has 298 pages and was first published in 1934, and since then it has been providing valuable embroidery information.
Mary Thomas’s Dictionary of Embroidery Stitches consists of over 400 embroidery stitches accompanied by clear pictures as well as the usages of the stitches. This book has a broad array of stitches ranging from basic outline to intermediate and finally to complex stitches, making it ideal for both beginners and skilled embroiderers. This is a versatile guide that will help you to choose the best color, materials, and techniques, thereby allowing you to achieve the exact project that you wanted.
16. The Constance Howard Book of Stitches by Constance Howard
This guide is a great hand embroidery book written by Constance Howard, who was a great influential pioneer in designing textiles and was first published in 1979. With this short introduction, then you can expect to learn a lot about hand embroidery. This classic book is designed to show the wide variety of embroidery stitches and their versatility, as well as teaching embroiderers how to make these stitches, use them, combine them, and make changes to create new stitches. The Constance Howard Book contains more than 70 hand embroidery stitches along with their detailed illustrations for better learning. It also contains clear images for extra explanations, however, the images are in black and white.
17. Anchor Book of Freestyle Embroidery Stitches by Eve Harlow
The Anchor Book by Eve Harlow is designed to provide an exclusive introduction to beginner embroiderers who wish to learn hand embroidery stitching. The Anchor Book covers basic hand embroidery techniques as well as 48 different types of stitches that are well explained. Each of these stitches is well described using step by step illustrations alongside trace-off patterns and diagrams. The clear stitch directions make it easy for beginners to learn these techniques.
18. Royal School of Needlework Embroidery Techniques by Sally Saunders
This is a colorful and inspirational embroidery book that introduces beginners to the main hand embroidery techniques. It consists of four sections divided into crewelwork covering jacobean, silk shading, goldwork, and blackwork. Each of these sections’ introduction consists of a historical overview followed by a stitch glossary, while each section contains projects and practical tips ideal for all embroiderers. This book consists of 16 projects that are easy to follow, including four beginner projects.
19. The Companion for Left-Handed Embroiderer’s by Yvette Stanton
Yvette Stanton is a left-handed embroiderer who had undergone the frustrations of using the right-handed embroidery instructions. Just like the title of this book, it is the real companion and best choice for left-handed embroiderers. The Left-Handed Companion contains more than 170 left-handed stitches with clear step by step instructions for each stitch. The book also provides a comparison between the left-handed and right-handed techniques. It also contains photos and diagrams for further explanations. Some of the stitches included are nun stitch, spiral trellis, parma stitch, and Breton stitch.
20. The Right-handed Embroiderer’s Companion by Yvette Stanton
Finally, this is the last book in this article and another embroidery guide by Yvette Stanton, but for the right-handed embroiderers, unlike the previous one. Just like The Left-Handed Embroiderer’s Companion, The Right-handed Embroiderer’s Companion book features similar and well-detailed instructions for right-handed beginner embroiderers. It contains 170 stitches similar to its twin with clear step by step instructions for each design. This book is rated as one of the best handbooks ever by one of the Amazon reviewers. Each technique is also illustrated further by the use of diagrams and photos.
Conclusion.
In conclusion, learning and acquiring the various embroidery techniques is quite challenging for most beginners, however, having the right embroidery book makes it easier and faster for you to master the skills. The above article has provided you with the 20 best embroidery books for beginners with embroidery designs and patterns.
