Embroidered Treasures: Birds: Exquisite Needlework of The Embroiderers’ Guild Collection

From Mary Corbet's Needle n Thread August 13, 2018:  Like the Flowers book, Embroidered Treasures: Birds is an exciting and inspiring look at a wide array of embroidery projects from different eras that feature our feathered friends. If you love birds and you love embroidery, and if you’re fascinated by the history of embroidery, you will love having this book in your library! Better yet, it is such a pretty book that it doesn’t need to be consigned to a bookshelf. It’s a perfect “coffee table” book, one that you can pick up and browse through at leisure, gleaning striking bursts of beauty and helpful bits of information every time you meander through it. All sorts of birds populate the book, from stylized birds to realistic renditions of birds in needlework. The format and approach of the books is similar to the Flowers book. With each featured embroidery, you’ll find dates, provenance, and all the details of techniques and materials used to create the embroidery. What I love about this new series of books from the Embroiderers’ Guild of the UK is that you can learn much from each book, just by studying the pieces in it.  No, it’s not an instructional project book – you won’t learn how to recreate, step-by-step, the embroidery pieces you see. But you will learn a lot about the history and development of embroidery, and you’ll see, at a glance, what kinds of techniques can be used to produce a certain look or style of embroidery.  This is very helpful, if you have ideas in mind for a project, but you’re not sure what techniques to use to get the look you want. Soooo…. bird lovers, historical needlework buffs, and general embroidery enthusiasts – this book’s for you!