Book Review: Stitched Blooms by Carina Envoldsen-Harris

I've always wanted to be good at embroidery. It's sewing that's portable. How appealing! I've tried many times over the years, but I was never really sure how to transfer the patterns to my fabric. Am I supposed to trace this with a pencil or a pen or what? And then once I started, my imperfect stitches always got me down.

Recently I learned about a neat product that promised to help with both problems. It has a kinda terrible name, Sticky Fabri-Solvy, but it's pretty miraculous. It's a printable, water-soluable stabilizer. You run it through your printer, stick it to your fabric, stitch over the design, and then soak it in water for a minute. The stabilizer dissolves and your perfect stitching is left behind. Reading Mollie's tutorial won me over and I ordered some.

Right at the same time I got a copy of Stitched Blooms, the new embroidery motif book by Carina Envoldsen-Harris. Perfect!

I'm a fan of Carina's blog and I love the look of her Polka and Bloom embroidery patterns. Now she's written a full book of them, with over 300 of her signature floral motifs.

Carina has a wonderful color and design aesthetic. Her embroidery is bright, modern, and fresh and this book is filled with all of that wonderfulness. You'll want to cover everything you make in beautiful flowers.

One of the big questions with embroidery is, "What do you do with it?". To help answer that question Stitched Blooms includes 20 projects to embellish. Some projects use store-bought objects as blank slates for embroidery, like mittens and tote bags, and others are very simple to sew, like this pretty horse.

I like that we get to see the motifs in use.

I've been saving this thrifted milk glass custard dish to make into a pincushion and decided the Pincushion Petit Four would be the perfect project.

I chose to stick with the motif Carina used for the pincushion in the book. The book comes with a handy CD which I used to print my motif on the Fabri-Solvy.

I used the one at the top and decided to save the bottom one for another project. I cut it out and pressed the motif onto some Kona cotton and started stitching.

The design is very pretty and easy to stitch, and the stabilizer totally solved all of my embroidery issues! It's so much easier to be neat when you can just follow printed lines.

After a quick soak in some water the stabilizer came right off, leaving a very pretty embroidery behind. I'm so proud!

Following the pattern in the book, I sewed it up and made this pretty pincushion.

I'm much more likely to embroider now, armed with this great stabilizer and all of these pretty florals!

You can pre-order Stitched Blooms now and have it in time to stitch some projects for the holidays. It's a lot of fun!

Disclaimer: I was sent a review copy of this book. Links in this post are Amazon affiliate links.