"Learn how to create beautiful machine-embroidered pictures of gardens, flowers, landscapes and woodlands using various combinations of just two simple machine stitches. All the techniques are broken down into clear, step-by-step instructions, with numerous helpful photographs and a great range of inspirational pieces"--Publisher's description.

Combining her love of gardens and landscapes with her skills as an artist and a machine embroiderer, Alison Holt shows you how to create exquisite flower pictures using your sewing machine. Alison's interpretations of what she sees in nature are so detailed that many people at first mistake her embroideries for paintings or even photographs. Alison's technique is to use her sewing machine like a paintbrush to apply threads in a myriad of different colours on to a canvas of hand-painted silk. This comprehensive and colourful book covers everything from composing a picture and setting up the machine to choosing threads and silk paints and creating different effects in stitch. Each of the three step-by-step projects allow you to put all you have learnt into practice to make a stunningly effective embroidered picture.

Show how to produce incredibly beautiful seascapes. Using threads as an artist would use paints to achieve stunningly realistic pictures full of mood and atmosphere - waves crashing onto a windswept beach, sunlight sparkling on a bright blue Mediterranean sea and dramatic sunset skies -- all created using just two simple machine stitches.--Cover.

This book describes the living-room artifacts, clothing styles, and intellectual proclivities of American classes from top to bottom.

One day Sophie comes home from school to find two questions in her mail: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" Before she knows it she is enrolled in a correspondence course with a mysterious philosopher. Thus begins Jostein Gaarder's unique novel, which is not only a mystery, but also a complete and entertaining history of philosophy.

Hendrik Petrus Berlage, the Dutch architect and architectural philosopher, created a series of buildings and a body of writings from 1886 to 1909 that were among the first efforts to probe the problems and possibilities of modernism. Although his Amsterdam Stock Exchange, with its rational mastery of materials and space, has long been celebrated for its seminal influence on the architecture of the 20th century, Berlage's writings are highlighted here. Bringing together Berlage's most important texts, among them "Thoughts on Style in Architecture", "Architecture's Place in Modern Aesthetics", and "Art and Society", this volume presents a chapter in the history of European modernism. In his introduction, Iain Boyd Whyte demonstrates that the substantial contribution of Berlage's designs to modern architecture cannot be fully appreciated without an understanding of the aesthetic principles first laid out in his writings.