Plant Lady Embroidery: 300 Botanical Embroidery Motifs & Designs to Stitch

Plant Lady Embroidery is a superlative collection for surface embroidery by Applemints. Originally published in 2017 in Japanese, this English translation edition was released 28th April 2020 by Quarto on their Quarry imprint, it's 120 pages and available in paperback format.

This is an oddly formatted book to western audiences.  The first 30% of the book is a catalogue of designs (and there are oodles of them!) presented in full color.  There is a short gallery of project inspirations after that (4 pages) along with an introduction and general techniques chapter.  This chapter covers materials, fabric and thread choices, needles, scissors, tensioning devices (hoops) etc etc.
It should be noted that this book is about surface embroidery, not cross stitch.  It's lovely to see tutorials and and upswing in interest for the other fibrearts; it seems like only cross-stitch had any following for a long long time and it's nice to see surface embroidery enjoying a renaissance.

Anyhow, following the materials and supplies chapter is a really well done tutorial chapter about the different stitches used for the patterns in the book.  The step-by-step photos are annotated and accompanied by explanatory text.  They're clear and easy to follow.

The final half of the book contains the patterns for the elements listed in the catalogue at the beginning.  They are mostly small(ish) elements which can be combined and switched around as desired.

I enjoyed the book very much.  It's a worthwhile and fun introduction and guide to learning embroidery. Many of the designs in the book could also serve as a good jumping off point for dimensional embroider/stumpwork.

Four and a half stars

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.