Donna Kooler

A lot of the designs are rather insipid or twee, - and I'd be embarrassed to have any of the holiday designs in my house - but there are some rather nice spot motifs of animals, birds, and butterflies worth saving the book for. As long as there's space for it.

The big problems with his book is that although there are lots of small designs, only about a third of them are illustrated when sewn. Thus, even though the patterns are coloured, you don't really have a good feel for what they will look like when stitched. (Of the ones that are properly illustrated, some of them look much nicer than the pattern would suggest.) I'm tempted to stitch the sparrow and the sea shells, but neither is illustrated in stitched form and I'm reluctant to take the risk show more that several weeks of sewing will produce a result that I'm not happy with.

A lot of the designs combine well into samplers. There's a lot of illustrations on particular themes and several decorative border/corner designs of vines and other plants.

There's a slightly American flavour to the designs in terms of the animals chosen and the holidays to be celebrated, but the overall range is good.

If this book had photographs of all the completed patterns, I would have rated it higher. show less

Excellent tutorial on cross-stitching for the beginner!
My first project was made so much easier after reading
through this book. The book is broken down in very short, easy to understand specific topics,complete with photographs and small patterns for the beginner.
The gallery of cross-stitch projects from the masters at the end of the book was nice too look at, but way out of the league of a beginner.

I inherited this book from my mother and I am glad that I did. It has a lot of fun stitch patterns and I refer to them often.