Book review: Freestyle Machine Embroidery

free You’ve probably heard of Carol Shinn and seen her work around the Internet. You may even have been lucky enough to learn from Carol through one of her many workshops. If not, here’s your chance to be tutored by her.

Carol is an American fiber artist who is known for her realistic images produced with machine stitching. Her book Freestyle Machine Embroidery: Techniques and Inspiration for Fiber Art shares amazing examples of her work and explains her techniques in detail. It is not a book for the casual crafter or dabbler, really. It’s more about producing fine art in an unusual medium.

If you paint but you’ve never before touched a sewing machine, and you’d like to experiment with painting with thread, this is the ideal book for you. Carol prepares you by explaining in simple terms the mechanics of the sewing machine so you can understand what’s happening between fabric and thread and you can manipulate that interaction. She steps through each critical element down to thread, needles, and hoops, pointing out pitfalls along the way. She even details how to set up your workspace and guide the fabric so that your body can tolerate long hours of stitching. There’s also plenty of information about canvas prep, color blending, and stitch variations.

But can a crafter with a limited background in studio art benefit from and enjoy this book? Well…yes. That’s just who I am, and I enjoyed it a lot. I’m probably never going to attempt photo-realistic fine art with my sewing machine. But there’s a very good chance, indeed, that some new machine-stitching experimentation will be going on my studio, thanks to this lovely book.

Freestyle Machine Embroidery was produced by Interweave and is available from Amazon.com and many other outlets. ISBN 978-1-59668-042-5

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If you like repeating cross stitch designs, borders you can use on other projects or as bookmarks, florals and Japanese-inspired designs, you’ll want to check out 200 Japanese Cross Stitch Designs by Saeko Endo. This collection of 200 cross stitch charts is low on instruction but big on inspiration for those who are comfortable taking a chart and running with it.

The book includes a brief introduction to the needed supplies and basics of stitching, but mostly is just photographs of finished designs and the charts that go with them. The charts vary widely in size and there can be anywhere from one to six charts printed on a single page.

Many of the designs are repeating patterns, but the chart shows a larger version so you can see how the repeats go together. Each chart has marked what portion is repeating and how many stitches and rows it includes. Other than that the charts are not numbered, but there are darker lines every five rows to help you count.

The patterns all range from one to three colors, and some include half cross stitches or back stitching, but most are full stitches.

The book is arranged into categories of motifs: geometric patterns, retro patterns, traditional Japanese patterns, floral and fauna and borders and pictorial motifs.

My favorites are the Japanese designs, many of which are recognizable from woodcuts, kimono designs and traditional shashiko embroidery. You’ll find cherry blossoms, suns, knots, and simple line designs that would be lots of fun to stitch.

There are a few pages devoted to different ways to modify charts such as changing colors, changing the way to design is repeated, flipping and rotating designs.

Other than that you’re on your own for how you actually want to use these designs. Of course they can just be stitched and framed but it might have been nice to see some of the projects stitched and staged in a way you might use them in everyday life (repeating motifs as coasters, or a bigger design turned into a pillow, for example).

Sometimes it helps to see designs used in different ways to get you thinking about how you might use them yourself. If you don’t need that creative push, this is a fine book full of patterns you’ll have fun playing with in different ways.

About the book: 112 pages, paperback, 200 patterns. Published 2025 by David & Charles. Suggested retail price $24.99.

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