Red Book of Sampler Stitches

Yesterday I received The Red Book of Sampler Stitches. The link is for 123 Stitch but the book is currently out of stock but you can sign up to get notified when it’s back in stock.

The book is by Eileen J. Bennett and the original copyright is from 2003 but it was revised in 2021. As you can see, it’s spiral bound which makes it very easy to open it up and fold it open to the back you need to be constantly viewing when doing some of the “new to me” stitches.

There are 72 pages. The pages are half sheets of regular size pages or about 5-1/2″ x 8-1/2″. The pages are cardstock. The stitches are all in alphabetical order and there is an index in the back. I do not know how many different stitches are shown but each page has at least one stitch, many pages have two stitches.

The drawings for each stitch show exactly where to put your stitches, i.e., come up at 1, go down at 2; come up at 3, go down at 4. I find the drawings to be very easy to follow.

In the past, I’ve only stitched one project with specialty stitches and that’s the rice stitch on a project I have yet to finish because of the rice stitch. That stitch isn’t hard – really none of them are – it’s simply a matter of knowing the order in which to stitch the steps to get the desired look.

Several times recently I’ve worked on charts that did have specialty stitches and I simply stitched plain “X” stitches because I didn’t want to figure out the steps for the advanced stitches. Now, I’m anxious to try some of those new to me stitches.

I can see this book being something that sits by my stitching chair and goes into a project bag if it’s something that has specialty stitches and I’ll be stitching on it away from home.

If you’re a cross stitcher and if you aren’t real familiar with all the fancy stitches, you might want to check out this book.