I was so happy last week when I received a craft book as a present - thank you, 
The book is entitled Zakka Embroidery: Simple One- and Two-Color Embroidery Motifs and Small Crafts. You may have seen it before, but here’s the cover:
It is not a new book, but as a reference and inspirational book it's great to have around.
I’ve seen the word zakka many times before. According to this definition:
The term refers to everything and anything that improves your home, life and appearance.
As you can imagine it can be ‘anything’ and I’ve seen it applied to household goods, fashion (crochet, knitting and embroidery) amongst others. From what I’ve observed in the book, the designs are simple and, anyone could attempt the projects.
The book has a very northern European feel with a first section of beautiful photographs, for instance :
A second section takes you through the stitch techniques and materials you need to make the projects. The photos are very clear, but I guess that nowadays we all just do a search and come up with a video on how to make stitches that we don't know that well.
A third section has very clear line patterns that you can copy :
It clearly tells the reader which stitches to use (mainly chain stitch, backstitch for outlining and French knots). My phone photo may not be that good but as you can see the flower above can be traced and worked on quite clearly. As soon as I saw this design I was interested in its similarity to the Charles Rennie McIntosh designs.
I included the photo above from this website to illustrate my point. I have never seen an original McIntosh rose, but the design has been reinterpreted many times and the flower design in this zakka book certainly reminded me of it.
The book also has quite detailed project instructions on how to make baby booties, purses, hair ties and so on.
All in all it is a lovely book to have and I am very happy because its main message is ‘have a go’; just use a few stitches or just the outline.
As a keen crafter, I am constantly trying to encourage others, especially my daughters, to have a go. I’m really happy that 
A couple of months ago, 
We discussed ideas and designs and she came up with an idea for an embroidered hoop with a ‘meaningful’ phrase. It’s not that irreverent a phrase, but she’s not finished it yet so I’ll just reveal a bit:
Here’s just using running stitch and back stitching… She got into the swing of it quite quickly but has been really busy so it’s still waiting for the final touches.
I put another photo of her work at the top of this post so it can get picked up by the ‘feed’.
I am sure I will be using designs from this handy little book and hopefully I will be posting some of my projects here.
Thanks for reading.