Embroidery Stitch Companion, The

World famous costume designer and embroiderer Coline Bavois brings you a perfect companion book to start to learn embroidery. Discover all the secrets of embroidery in this little handbook.

This little handbook is designed to be your indispensible companion on your journey into the vast yet intricate world of embroidery. Compact enough to travel alongside your needles and threads, it is also a sumptuous visual guide to needlecraft, allowing you to embroider whatever you want, wherever you want.

From making sound stitch choices to finishing your work with a flourish, the techniques within the book are those that the author uses and frequently revisits, and are simplified to ensure that the art of embroidery is within anyone's reach. If you are a beginner, you will find in this book all the information you need to get started, and soon gain confidence in your skills. If you are an established and confident embroiderer, the book includes plenty of tips and ideas to help you progress your work even further. 

Dip in and out of the book as you wish, and follow your own creative embroidery aspirations! The book starts out by introducing all that you may need to become an embroiderer, and then explains the basic techniques, for preparing your fabric, threading the needle, and even displaying your work in a hoop.

Then progress to learning some of the more simple stitches to have at your disposal, before progressing to more complex stitches that will take your embroidery skills to the next level.

Let costume designer Coline Bavois, and The Embroidery Stitch Companion, become your indispensable guides to this timeless needlecraft.

Coline Bavois discovered embroidery 10 years ago during her costume design studies, and it was love at first sight. She then went into training in art and fashion trades where she learnt embroidery, featherbedding, artificial floristry and millinery. Today she is a costume designer for the cinema industry, and she embroiders for films but also in Haute Couture projects, on top of her personal work in artistic embroidery. She likes to mimic natural textures, and things such as coral and tree bark are her inspirations. She enjoys working with traditional material in unusual ways by diverting the traditional techniques, but she also uses recycled materials.

She sometimes gets to exhibit her work, such as at the London-based competition, Hand and Lock, where she was one of the final contestants in 2018. After practising for several years, she wanted to popularize and pass on this craft through this book. 

Coline has worked on recent films and TV series as costumier, such as Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) and the new Amazon Prime serial, The Serpent Queen, as seamstress.