Featuring new and exciting techniques on how to dissolve, melt, and distort fabric both before and after stitching, this guide explores the evolving and innovative materials that are introduced into the textile market and instructs fiber artists how to use them creatively and effectively. Whether dissolving, melting, punching, slashing, or distorting textiles, crafters can achieve fascinating effects using the handbook's easy-to-follow steps, design tips, and diagrams. The book's organization around three themes--stitch, dissolve, and distort--allows experienced embroiderers to easily incorporate fresh ideas into their favorite stitching styles.

This volume, written by two experienced teachers of embroidery, shows how to gain mastery over your sewing machine and produce exactly the effect you want. Techniques include running stitch, zig zag, satin stitch, whip stitch, combined stitches and cable stitch.

Almost every piece of embroidery, including quilting or soft furnishings, needs finishing or edging – maybe just a simple hem or binding but more often a truly decorative finishing that enhances the textile. So often these finishing techniques are an afterthought, but they should be designed when the textile is designed, should use the same style of stitching and, often, the same threads or fabrics. This book – from one of the UK's leading machine embroiderers – gives a library of possibilities, which can be used creatively, developed further and made more individual by the reader. It is ideal for the less-experienced machine embroiderer but a great sourcebook for the more advanced. Each edging and finishing method is covered in a double-page spread with instructive text, diagrams and colour photography placed together for clarity. The methods given include designs for wall hangings, panels, book covers, bags, vessels, bowls, cushions, belts, tassels and other accessories. Any modern sewing machine will do all the stitching suggested here.

This book shows how anyone with a sewing machine can experiment with stitched patterns to create innovative embroideries. The book presents new ways of adapting stitch patterns on a variety of different fabrics and combining them with a range of techniques – hand-stitching, free machine embroidery, quilting, applique and beads. Swinging stitches, patterns and ribbons, stitching and slashing, quilting with patterns, machine-wrapped cords, stuffed ribbon braids and larger motifs are just some of the ideas included in this colourful book.

A ground-breaking book when first published in 2003 it is now a classic for all those involved in the textile world. It features exciting, innovative and modern machine embroidery from one of the most accomplished writers on the subject. 'Raising the Surface with Machine Embroidery' is a book for everyone who is interested in texture in embroidery. Beautifully illustrated, it is structured in six chapters, covering : • Backgrounds, often using experimental or unusual materials • Raising the surface a little to produce highly textured, low-relief embroideries • The next step - raising the surface even more • Using applied motifs for high-relief textiles • Frames, masks and high-relief panels • Three-dimensional constructions, bowls, vessels and towers Lavishly illustrated with over 95 colour photgraphs, the book includes clear diagrams and detailed instructions, step-by-step where necessary. All you need is enthusiasm and a swing needle sewing machine to make the wonderful textures featured within these pages.

Claude has an intuitive faith in something splendid and feels at odds with his contemporaries. The war offers him the opportunity to forget his farm and his marriage of compromise; he enlists and discovers that he has lacked. But while war demands altruism, its essence is destructive