Book Review: Stitch Love – Sweet Creatures Big & Small

Stitch Love is the first craft book by Mollie Johanson of Wild Olive who creates embroidery patterns and printables. The book focuses on animals and includes 25 projects to stitch, all with her signature happy face.

The projects are mostly suitable for beginners, and designed to be hand-sewn with fabrics like felt and fleece that are very forgiving. You’ll find everything from finger puppets and kids games to plush and even a mini quilt.

There are also lots of fun ideas of things to embroider with cute designs, like a dinosaur in your shirt pocket or a squirrel on your sweater!

Best of all, the book includes over 100 embroidery motifs, each stitched up by Mollie for pages that are so fun to browse through. You’ll find all your favourite animals and some fantastical creatures too. The characters are also printed as line drawings for tracing or transfer on to fabric, along with a helpful section of sewing tips.  There are templates for each project included – they need enlarging, but there are web links to download them at the correct size for printing.

I had a go at making the first project in the book, the Awesome Outback Plush Trio. I just made the koala, but he has kiwi and kangaroo friends, plus house pouches for them to live in too!

I just traced the templates on to paper and then cut out the felt pieces, embroidering the face and then stitching all the pieces together with a little bit of stuffing inside. I found the instructions didn’t go into quite enough detail – there was no suggestion as to how many strands of embroidery thread to use, leading to a bit of trial and error. I’d also forgotten how to do french knots and the instructions didn’t help me remember at all so I had to Google that. Other than that, it all went together really quickly and turned out super cute!

I’m excited to try out a few more of the projects and would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a bit of hand sewing and especially if you have kids to sew for as they’ll love a lot of the projects. It’s also pretty much worth buying just for the embroidery motifs – they’re adorable to look through and could be used for so many sewing projects as well as for drawing.

Stitch Love is published by Lark Books and is available from Amazon or your favourite independent bookseller. Look out for a Super Cute Creators interview tomorrow to find out more about Mollie and her cute embroidery.

(Stitch Love book was provided for review but these are my honest opinions and the photos are my own, except for the top image by Mollie Johanson)