Good evening and thank you for joining me for another boring books for bedtime.

I hope tonight's selection provides all the boredom your busy brain needs to quiet down and let you get some sleep.

So find a comfortable spot.

Adjust your volume.

Take a nice deep breath in.

Let it out slowly.

And off we go.

Tonight, let's relax with a little bit about the craft world.

With art in needlework, a book about embroidery by Lewis F. Day, author of Windows, Alphabets, Nature in Ornament, and Other

Textbooks of Ornamental Design, and Mary Buckle. First published in 1900 by B.T. Batsford, 94 High Wholeborn, London. Let's begin. Preface.

Embroidery may be looked at from more points of view than it would be possible in a book like this to take up seriously.

Merely to hover around the subject and glance casually at it would serve no useful purpose.

It may be as well, therefore, to define our standpoint. We look at the art from its practical side, not of course neglecting

the artistic, for the practical use of embroidery is to be beautiful. The custom has been,

since woman learnt to kill time with the needle, to think of embroidery too much as an idle accomplishment.

It is more than that. At the very least, it is a handicraft, at the best it is an art.

This contention may be to take it rather seriously, but if one esteemed it less, it would hardly be worth writing about,

and the book when written would not be worth the attention of students of embroidery, needleworkers, and designers of needlework to whom it is addressed.

It sets forth to show what decorative stitching is,

how it is done, and what it can do.

It is illustrated by samplers of stitches,

by diagrams to explain the way stitches are done,

...