Stitch a Masterpiece

About C&T Publishing

C&T Publishing is a craft book publisher encompassing a range of subjects, including quilting, sewing, embroidery, cozy mysteries, Cosplay, and more. Made for makers by makers, our product development team works together to create practical and dynamic products that stir creativity and promote self-expression. Visit their website: ctpub.com

www.mrxstitch.com

The book is aimed at hand embroidery lovers, but I could see it also lending itself very nicely to free motion embroidery on the sewing machine, or even just being something really relaxing to colour in, sketch your own versions of, or paint if you wanted to.

Art history lesson anyone? The artists inside range from Michaelangelo to Leonardo da Vinci, to Vincent van Gogh, to Edvard Munch. Oh yes, The Scream is in there I cant wait to start that one!

C&T Publishing have put the book together to give you as many options as possible on each masterpiece. For example, when I want to start stitching The Scream Im presented with four different size options. And if you wanted to stitch Two Sisters (On the Terrace) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir you have four options of the full print, plus a close up of each sister individually as well.

The layout of the book, while it works, is quite strange to me. Instructions on how to use it are on the inside front cover and then youre straight into the designs on page one. There is no welcome or contents. You then have all of the designs, and a gallery of the masterpieces with some colour swatches. It doesnt give actually DMC references, just colour swatches to try to match your threads up to. I quite like that idea for using it as a bit of a stash buster project. The inside back cover features an array of stitch examples.

What makes the book special is the designs in it. They arent just outlines for you to copy onto fabric via a light box, they are iron on transfers which will all work several times each. So, you can stitch your favourite masterpiece lots of times in various sizes and you can mix up the colours as much as you like to create your own version of any masterpiece in there.

If you know an art lover who enjoys stitching this is a great book. They can iron on the design and get going really fast and they can do that multiple times with each project, in any size they like. As I say, Ill definitely start with The Scream, but Im sure I wont stop there.

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Recreate the famous paintings by celebrated artists in thread with these multi use iron-on embroidery transfers. There are 23 different paintings and as most of them are shown in more than one size (plus small details) they are suitable for many different applications from framed pictures to bags, pillows and even buttons and jewellery.

Inside the front cover are the simple instructions for transferring plus stitching tips. This is a book of transfers only but if you turn to the back there is a page of sixteen popular freestyle embroidery stitches. The first half of the book contains the transfers and the second full colour reproductions of the paintings on glossy paper together with a handy swatch of all the colours used. There are no projects; this is very much a book aimed at the confident embroiderer who wants a selection of transfers to interpret. Three of the pictures are shown stitched which is useful, I would have liked to have seen a few more but maybe it is best that the imagination gets a bit of a workout. I love the idea of this book and can think of many things I want to use the transfers on, but my only real gripe is that famous art from around the world is a bit misleading. Most of the pictures are by European artists from the Renaissance or Impressionist movements including six by Van Gogh, which is rather a lot out of only twenty-three. There are a couple by American artists but only one non-Western example, The Great Wave by Hokusai. It would have been nice to have seen more examples from other cultures but this aside, any embroiderer who enjoys using their imagination with choice of stitches will love this imaginative book of transfers.