Mark-Making Through the Seasons: Textile Art Inspiration and Techniques

This is a unique book of sewing techniques and ideas. It encourages the reader to explore their OWN responses to their work, and gives some excellent techniques to connect with what they see and feel in their inspirations. Most sewing art books barrage with an overwhelming amount of examples of other artist's work, but Helen Parrott respects that we each have our own work to do, and would rather do it than pour other people's ideas over our head until we can't even see straight. Keep it close for reference, you'll be glad to have it.

The slow stitch movement has permanent roots in the world of fiber arts today. The evolution of the stitch as a tradition of women's work has transitioned into a movement that also includes mindfulness and thought, needle and thread, and purposefulness of creation. Helen Parrott's exploration of seasonal mark-making presents suggestions of recording our walks through nature. Capturing seasonal changes in thread and color, stitched or painted on paper or textile, free-form stitching in both hand and machine will continue to inspire as reflections are made upon the processes Parrott applies. This is a book I will return to over and over again.

This is a thoughtful book written on a very specific topic - embroidery using seasonal themes.I enjoyed the book, and the author’s description of her thinking and development in her work is clearly described and documented by photos. My only complaint (and the reason I gave it 4 stars, instead of 5) is I would have liked to see more of her final completed projects developed from the many samples she shows in the book and discussion of why she used (or discarded/modified) her sample stitching.This is not a ‘how-to’ embroidery book, but it does delve into this artist’s thought processes and the development of her work.

I ordered this book hoping it might be and inspiring use of stitch. Alas it was not. Instead it was quite basic. Photo in the book showed mostly use of drab color. Given that stitch inspired by the seasons could have been a wonderful exploration of color, this book was sadly lacking.

I have the author's first book, Mark Making, which I really like and found thought provoking and inspiring. This book doesn't contain exactly the same material, but instead it focuses on nature as a source for inspiration, and if you liked the first book, you will probably like this one too. It is building on the same general ideas and ways of working.

I am using this book every day!

I like her work, some lovely phorigraphs throughout but I think her first book was the best and feel a bit that all others are reusing same /similar images. A very nice book if you don't have any already but if you do I would say this isn't much different

I was very disappointed with this book. I found it very simplistic with a lot of photographs of the countryside but not a lot more. The ideas seemed very basic and not at all challenging. I was hoping for some inspiration but there was none. Straight to the charity shop I think!

Excellent, lovely illustrations. Lots of ideas and inspiration

This is an inspiring book came just at the right time for me.

Great ideas for textile work.