The Topic of This Posting is Books

In 1978 when I first joined The Embroiderers' Guild, I found myself in an active and friendly chapter that met in a church hall n Collingswood, NJ. That first meeting I attended was my second life epiphany where I found other people who were as passionate and dedicated as I was to the threaded needle. Those first years were a wonderful time for me with every day being a learning experience and every meeting having a new teacher. I was in that chapter until 1984 when we moved to Sandy, Utah, with my husband's job. The name of the chapter, now disbanded, was the Creative Needlework Chapter.

It was in that chapter that I met and had for teachers people like Jane Zimmerman who came out from California every year to teach on the east coast. Betsy Lieper first taught me crewel embroidery, the long and short stitch, soft shading, and how to do a perfect satin stitch. Muriel Bishop came from Princeton. Pauline Fischer came from New York to teach crewel on canvas. Ilsa Alther taught blackwork and Hardanger. Mary Fry came with some color studies and Ginger Di Pasquale came for igolochkoy. No one could have better teachers.

The topic of this posting is books. I can see that I digressed down Memory Lane a little. But the author of one of the books I am going to talk about I also met during this time at the Creative Needlework Chapter. Her name is Edie Feisner and she has written the best book on color that I have seen so far. As Carole Rinard and I write this Color Correspondence Course, we have looked at a lot of books on color, both old and new. Some are pretty good and some are pretty bad, but Edie Feisner's book stands out. It is called Color Studies and is a text book for Montclair State University, NJ. It is full of color pictures, diagrams, famous art, and student works. It is a complete study of the topic and very accessible. I highly recommend it. ISBN: 1-56367-213-8

Page from The Book of the Smiling Moon, an altered book by Shirley Kay

If one disregards the beads at the top, this page is a monochromatic color combination with orange plus neutrals. The splattered paint is tone of orange. If the blue beads are considered part of the color scheme, then it is a complement: blue and orange. Color combinations, tones, and neutrals are some of the topics considered in the correspondence course.

The second book I am recommending is Principles of Color Design by Wucius Wong. This little book presents color from a little different perspective than other books on color. Wong shows color in the context of design theory. The examples he shows are all his own work that are abstract designs. Because of this we learn about color from a pure and unified standpoint. This book is for a more advanced student of color, but very valuable in the understanding of how color works and how to manipulate it. I also highly recommend this book. ISBN: 0-442-29284-8

Mr. Wong has also written two books on design theory. If a person only had those two books, she could know almost all of what she needs to know about the pure theory. His books are excellent: Theory of Two-Dimensional Design and Theory of Three-Dimensional Design.

To bridge the first two paragraphs to this last paragraph, I want to mention Sandia Mountains Chapter, my current chapter of the EGA. We are also very friendly and very open to new things. Unfortunately in this day and age, national teachers are harder to come by because of the expense of traveling to such a far place. Also back in NJ we were new to embroidery and ready to learn anything and everything. Here in NM many of us have been in the EGA for three decades and more and have sampled most everything at least once. But we continue to get good national teachers, plus we have some excellent teachers within the chapter itself.