Well, the 100% represents the actual size of the design as it comes in the book. In fact, I made two copies: the first is at 100% and the second at 90% (or 10% reduced in size). The next step I took is represented in the photo above, which doesn’t look too much different from the photo above it! But to clarify: I photocopied the design. And I have two copies of the book – that’s why I’m not sweating the destruction of this one! But, it’s all for The Cause, my friends! All for The Cause! We do what we must! Unfortunately, in cutting out the hummingbird page, I had to disrupt a design on the back of the page that’s part of a two-page layout. The way the book is bound required me to slice the page I needed out, rather than cut the page or undo the binding. This is where a craft knife (think x-acto) comes in handy.

Next, I did the one thing you should never do to a book: I cut it to pieces. I settled on the hummingbirds finally, because as my ideas for the project developed, the “mirrored” birds seemed to be the best subject for translation. They each had their merits and I can easily see each of them translated with different types of embroidery techniques. Three designs struck me as particular suitable for the types of projects I was toying with: the owl, the peacock, and the hummingbirds. If you’re familiar with the book and have your own copy of it, you’ll be able to go through it at this point to see what I’m talking about. The very first thing I did in preparing to prepare for this embroidery project (besides getting the artist & publisher’s permission to do all this with their book!) was consider the designs in the book and select the one I want to re-create with needle and thread. To start off, I’ll show you my preliminary steps in preparing to think about embroidering the design I chose from Secret Garden, and I’ll tell you what you can expect in this kind of step-by-step project development on Needle ‘n Thread. We’ll mark today as the official start date of this series on an embroidery project based on a design by Johanna Basford, from her book Secret Garden: An Inky Treasure Hunt and Coloring Book, which I mentioned to you in December.

Or should I call this preliminary preliminaries? Whatever the case…

Secret garden johanna