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Book Review: teach Yourself Visually:Beadwork

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Teach yourself visually Chris Franchetti Michaels has published a new book Teach Yourself Visually: Beadwork. This is a very thorough book on off-loom techniques in beading.

Each chapter covers a specific stitch and includes tons of photographs and diagrams to help you learn these stitches.  The author also covers materials, terminology in beading and adds extra tips on many of the pages so that the reader/beader learns a lots as they go through each project.  This is a great reference book for new beadser and those looking to refresh their skills.

The first chapter is especially useful as it covers “Skills and Techniques” such as length of thread, ending threads, correcting mistakes and much more.

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How to Store Embroidery Needles

I have a complicated relationship with my embroidery needles. Which is a fancy way of saying I don’t really take care of my needles at all. Even though I know I have embroidery needles to use for cross stitch and sewing, needles that are certainly still in their packages, I can rarely find them when I need them.

So when I saw this post from Crewel Ghoul about how to store your embroidery needles, it hit close to home for me.

It doesn’t really say anything I didn’t already know, but it is good advice that might also serve as a reminder for you to take better care of your needles when you cross stitch or do other hand-sewing projects so that you’ll be able to find your needles again when you need them.

It would help me a lot if I had a dedicated place to keep needles I’m not using, including the needles that are still in their packages from when I bought them. You’d think I would keep them with my embroidery floss but apparently you would be mistaken about that.

Another good idea for me is to have a place to put needles I’ve been using when I am done with them. Because goodness knows I’m not going to put them back in the package. (Which may actually be a good thing because then I know which one I’ve been using and which ones are fresh. Not that I replace my needles regularly, but still.) I own pincushions but I don’t really use them for anything, which is silly.

Check out the post at Crewel Ghoul to see all the options available for storing your embroidery needles properly. I’d love to hear what you do, especially if you have a better system than I do (which, honestly, would be any system at all).

[Photo: Crewel Ghoul]