Gardens & More • Jan Beaney & Jean Littlejohn
Digital Edition – View Online + Download Today
This embroidery book inspires the textile artist to look at gardens with fresh eyes, interpret unusual viewpoints or individual plants in fabric and thread.
$12.50
Gardens and More • Book 5 by Jan Beaney & Jean Littlejohn
Gardens are one of the most popular topics for painters and textile artists to ponder upon and interpret in various media. As many embroiderers are also knowledgeable and enthusiastic gardeners it can at times be difficult for them not to portray gardens in a predictable way. We can never emulate nature so it is often wiser to endeavor to capture the very essence, memory or feeling of any exciting or stimulating feature that first appealed to you. Some aspects could be isolated and emphasized and certain areas exaggerated while simplifying or understating others. It is not necessary to try and represent them precisely. Colors can be spectacular or pale and subtle, plant forms enlarged or simplified, scale and proportions contrived to suit you. Use the information gleaned but allow your imagination to blossom.
Themes or concepts may influence your thought processes. Warm, ‘hot’ colours may suggest a garden of love; golds and silvers to celebrate certain anniversaries, whereas historical personalities and events or fictional characters from books could easily set you on another train of thought.
The garden is just the beginning and ideas will emerge much faster than the ability to keep up with them. Here, the garden notebook will be really useful for recording information and noting down thoughts or ideas as they occur. Books on gardening are not only useful for the practical gardener but the designer might find the odd germ of an idea that could inspire a piece of work.
This book hopes to offer suggestions and ideas to possibly revise your thoughts about creating unique stitched pieces inspired by a much-loved subject. Sensuous, evocative, memorable, unusual, pretty and witty are all words that we have considered when compiling this book. We hope that you will enjoy it and better still be moved to stitch your own interpretations.
- 28 pages of full color illustrations
- Online Reader + PDF Download
- First published by Double Trouble Enterprises 2000
- ISBN No. 0-9531750-4-9
Jan Beaney & Jean Littlejohn • About the Authors

Jan Beaney and Jean Littlejohn are internationally acclaimed textiles artists, authors and educators. For more than forty years the duo know as “Double Trouble Enterprises” has been challenging traditional notions of embroidery and stitch by working with soluble fabrics, mixed media, bonding, printing, embellishing and collage and extensive use of color development and journaling to great success. Founding members of the 62 Group of Textile Artists, featured instructors at Callaway Gardens School of Needle Arts, City & Guilds (London), Fellows of the Society of Designer Craftsmen (UK) and Presidents emeritus of the Embroiderers’ Guild (UK), Jan and Jean continue their work in inspiring stitch artists of all ages with print books, digital books, and a wide range of DVDs and streaming workshops.
Learn more about Jan and Jean in their interview with TextileArtist.org
Visit their Double Trouble Enterprises Website