Cross Stitch Christmas: 20 Beautiful Designs for the Festive Season

Description

These are beautifully delicate Christmas cross stitch designs to delight the heart and soul! If you love cross stitch, you need this book. Extremely pretty these designs from accomplished embroiderer Helene Le Berre are light and airy, using backstitch to outline and emphasize with great skill. Split into chapters on Advent Foliage, Christmas Animals, Festive Foliage and Amazing Alphabets, there is a lovely range of designs to fit every Christmas situation. You can make beautiful cutlery pockets with fox, bunny or baby deer motifs, a reindeer photo album cover, a pine cone confectionery sachet, personalized gift labels and many more elegant embroidered Christmas items. The charts are beautifully presented, along with a comprehensive techniques section at the back of the book. Suitable for beginners to more advanced stitchers, these designs are achievable and utterly gorgeous.

Helene Le Berre is a talented designer who graduated from the Duperre School of Applied Arts. She has been creating her lovely embroidered designs since 2007. She loves to play with bright colours, joyful and delicate patterns and to tell a little heartwarming story through her work. Her favourite embroidery themes are flowers and stories for children.

Cross stitch lovers will adore this book of Christmas designs. Foliage, animals and alphabets are designed to fit together to create samplers or use separately for small decorations on napkins, wall banners or bunting. I just adored the picture of the wooden box of thimbles, I feel this sets the tone for the book in general. It is traditional, warm and really makes you want for Christmas to come early. The designs are neat and simple. The colour palette is beautifully put together and each project has a story attached as well as tips from the DIY Christmas elf. The full page charts are accompanied by a thread key, and instructions to complete each project are easy to follow. The photography is beautiful, showing the delicacy and elegance in each design. This is a perfect book to give as a gift and one that will used year after year. -- Tracy Shephard * Postcard Reviews * As you can see from the contents page, there is a wide range of cross stitch designs from festive foliage to Christmas animals, and from advent to alphabets. Each design is so beautiful, classy and fabulously photographed. Following the photos of the projects, and then the charts, there is a "techniques and making up" section. -- Naomi Clarke * naomialice.com * Hand embroidery enthusiasts will be so excited to explore these festive cross-stitch designs by accomplished embroiderer Helene Le Berre The projects are suitable for beginners and advanced stitchers alike, with comprehensive information on techniques to fill in any gaps in your knowledge. There are 20 dedicated winter scenes to choose from, so the hardest part will be selecting which one to stitch first! * Sew Christmas * This book contains 20 designs and each design has an anecdote, recipe, game, or quote alongside the design picture. This is different and both informative and interesting. For example, there are regional traditions, vegan nutty star recipes, stories and more. Now to the cross stitching. Helene works on DMC 28 count ivory evenweave and she also recommends 6 stranded embroidery thread. She gives a table for using Aida, linen, evenweave and etamine. As well as saying how many strands of threads needed for different fabric counts. All the charts in colour with corresponding thread numbers. Helene suggests that you use a punched thread organiser and note down the chart colours to numbered thread, especially if you use your own threads. I would also recommend this. This book has very fine embroideries and looks extremely delicate and beautiful. If you are looking for Christmas cross stitch projects with a twist and contemporary designs, I think this book would suit perfectly. -- Sally Wilkinson * The SEW Region Magazine - Book Threads *