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Pen To Thread: 750+ Hand-Drawn Embroidery Designs to Inspire Your Stitches!
Picture-perfect embroidery projects!
Looking to add some inspiration to your embroidery? Look to Pen to Thread ! Illustrator and fabric designer Sarah Watson has hand drawn more than 750 whimsical, imaginative motifs in one place--sheer delight for anyone who wields a needle!
From every day objects like birdcages and backpacks to sophisticated poodles, playful mermaids, and punchy pinatas, each pattern is more charming than the next. Sarah has also included embroidery and stitching basics in case you're new to this fun and addictive hobby. She offers tips on choosing color as well as a CD containing individual PDFs of all motifs and alphabets for easy resizing. Any motif can be made distinctly yours with Sarah's easy-to-follow instructions. Your finished projects will make perfect gifts--but you won't want to give them away.
With pattern chapters like School Days, In the Kitchen, The Great Outdoors, and By the Sea, there's no limit to where Pen to Thread can take you!
Looking to add some inspiration to your embroidery? Look to Pen to Thread ! Illustrator and fabric designer Sarah Watson has hand drawn more than 750 whimsical, imaginative motifs in one place--sheer delight for anyone who wields a needle!
From every day objects like birdcages and backpacks to sophisticated poodles, playful mermaids, and punchy pinatas, each pattern is more charming than the next. Sarah has also included embroidery and stitching basics in case you're new to this fun and addictive hobby. She offers tips on choosing color as well as a CD containing individual PDFs of all motifs and alphabets for easy resizing. Any motif can be made distinctly yours with Sarah's easy-to-follow instructions. Your finished projects will make perfect gifts--but you won't want to give them away.
With pattern chapters like School Days, In the Kitchen, The Great Outdoors, and By the Sea, there's no limit to where Pen to Thread can take you!
160 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 14, 2016
The designs are just adorable! A little basic information for new embroiderers with illustrations as well as color photographs. There are more than a few designs I hope to use to introduce my eight year old niece to the craft.
May 10, 2025
I wouldn't use the patterns themselves, but the first 41 pages of this book was the best damn introduction to embroidery I've ever seen/read. It explains/shows examples/comparisons of different fabrics and threads and shows both how stiches are done in general and then how they can be used to cover up mistakes.
December 11, 2017
Mainly to be used for ideas of embroidery motifs.
April 29, 2020
Excellent tips on embroidering the more random things you might want to embroider!
March 30, 2017
2.5 stars
This is primarily a motif book, although there are the obligatory instructions in the front. I laud the author/illustrator for attempting a new way of presenting a stitch--showing where the thread is under the fabric as well as the top--but the execution is poor and just makes the image confusing.
There's a nice stitch sampler that shows a number of stitches made with different types of floss. Unfortunately, the picture is so small that it's hard to discern any but the most obvious distinctions. There's also a fabric sampler which is helpful and the pictures are bigger, but not big enough to really see the weave well. Other useful things in this section include what notions and tools make up a standard embroiderer's kit, transfer techniques, and resizing motifs. But none are enough in depth for any reader new to embroidery who doesn't already have a good handle on crafts in general already.
Most of the images in the tips/instructions section are line drawings which aren't as helpful as they could be. For example, the pages on color would be far more helpful if the examples were shown in photos so you could see how the color actually played out.
The motifs vary in quality, many looking as though someone without a lot of artistic ability drew them. This seems to be a trend with the whimsical style that's popular right now, but I think there's a difference between light whimsy and poor drawing skill. The styles here vary between one and the other with some being cute cartoons and others being painfully awkward. It's saying something when even I don't find the dogs particularly appealing. If you know me, you are familiar with the fact that I am very forgiving when it comes to images of dogs.
Only a few of the designs are shown in photos as well. Those in photos are not true to the picture really, being more interpretations of the design rather than exact copies. This feels like inadequate execution rather than creative license.
Overall this book is just so so. I'm rounding up the star rating because all of the motifs are on an accompanying CD-ROM that is organized well, although they are all in PDFs which are scalable if formatted from EPS graphics but don't appear to be here.
This is primarily a motif book, although there are the obligatory instructions in the front. I laud the author/illustrator for attempting a new way of presenting a stitch--showing where the thread is under the fabric as well as the top--but the execution is poor and just makes the image confusing.
There's a nice stitch sampler that shows a number of stitches made with different types of floss. Unfortunately, the picture is so small that it's hard to discern any but the most obvious distinctions. There's also a fabric sampler which is helpful and the pictures are bigger, but not big enough to really see the weave well. Other useful things in this section include what notions and tools make up a standard embroiderer's kit, transfer techniques, and resizing motifs. But none are enough in depth for any reader new to embroidery who doesn't already have a good handle on crafts in general already.
Most of the images in the tips/instructions section are line drawings which aren't as helpful as they could be. For example, the pages on color would be far more helpful if the examples were shown in photos so you could see how the color actually played out.
The motifs vary in quality, many looking as though someone without a lot of artistic ability drew them. This seems to be a trend with the whimsical style that's popular right now, but I think there's a difference between light whimsy and poor drawing skill. The styles here vary between one and the other with some being cute cartoons and others being painfully awkward. It's saying something when even I don't find the dogs particularly appealing. If you know me, you are familiar with the fact that I am very forgiving when it comes to images of dogs.
Only a few of the designs are shown in photos as well. Those in photos are not true to the picture really, being more interpretations of the design rather than exact copies. This feels like inadequate execution rather than creative license.
Overall this book is just so so. I'm rounding up the star rating because all of the motifs are on an accompanying CD-ROM that is organized well, although they are all in PDFs which are scalable if formatted from EPS graphics but don't appear to be here.
July 26, 2024
The designs in this book are really zany and clever (see if you can find the swan with a tiara). I love the stitch sampler at the beginning because it demonstrates 6 types of thread in five different ways, so if you're thinking about doing French knots in yarn or wool, but you can't decide, this sampler will show you what each looks like.
October 19, 2016
I thought the patterns were cute and I already have a few ideas on how I'm going to use them.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews