Book review: How to bead

I would like to share a book with you that I keep coming back to, time after time. “How to Bead: French Embroidery Beading” by Maisie Jarratt.

Before writing this, I headed over to Amazon to see if they had any reviews. Yes, they do, and some of the reviewers did NOT like this book. I do. And here’s why.

This book focusses on embroidery beading. I’ve seen many books on beading, but often they are not about how to incorporate beading into your embroidery. That’s the part of beading that interests me. I know that people can make lovely beaded jewellery and things like that, but beading comes alive for me when the beads are sewn on fabric!

This book goes through techniques for sewing beads – mostly seed beads and bugle beads – on in straight lines and curves. Maisie also deals with sequins and specialty beads. These are the techniques that I used in my beaded dress (detail shown left – this is my work, not an example from the book).

For those who wish to learn tambour beading, there is a very small amount of information (with photos) in this book. I have never tried this, and I do not know if these instructions would be all you’d need. But Maisie did write another book on tambour beading that you could look out for, if you were interested (I don’t have it, so can’t comment on it).

There are diagrams in this book that illustrate the techniques shown. Admittedly, they are hand drawn in a very rough style that many of us are not used to in these days of computer generated illustrations. However, while they are not the most attractive things you have ever seen, they do the job!

None of the projects in this book are anything that I would ever make. To me they are rather dated looking (the book was published in 1991), but they’re not why I bought the book anyway. I bought this book on a whim in a bookshop one day. It seemed interesting and was a very reasonable price. I had no need for it at the time.

However, in the years since, I have used this book to teach me how to sew beads onto embroidery in a quick and effective technique. I like it, and am extremely pleased to own it.