Books and Cooking Class

Today I did a wonderful cooking Class called Elegant Vegetarian with Nadine Abensur . Nadine is the author of some cookbooks, two of these are - Enjoy and The Cranks Bible. We made Mediterranean Garlic Soup with Red Onion and Cumin Jam, Cauliflower Fritters in Chickpea batter with Zhoug, Dolmades of Haloumi in olive oil with pine nut, tomato and Chickpea couscous. Artichoke and Parsley Salad, Fried Eggplant with pistashio, coriander, orange blossom pesto and finally for dessert - Churros with Chocolate sauce. The food was absolutely beautiful and Nadine is such a great chef and teacher. I'll have to keep my eye out for more of her classes as it was alot of fun.

This is one book I have been interested in getting but I ended up getting it out from my local library. It starts off with the basics and then has a gallery of lots of designs, explaining how they are done. Then the last section has various projects. The designs in the book are all very modern, interesting and are great inspiration to explore your own ideas. I haven't tried Crewel before so I'll have to have a go. But this one is also good for exploring ideas for other types of embroidery as well.

I also found this book "Stitches for Embroidery" at my local library and it turned out to be abit of a surprise. I'd like to buy this book to have as a reference book. The first part has a stitch sampler of the 20 stitches that are used in the book followed by the directions for doing each stitch. The next sections explore Lines, Texture, Filling Shapes, Leaves and Foliage, Round Flowers, Flower Spikes, Flower Impressions, Stems Trunks and Branches, Trees, Sky, Water, Buildings, Stitch patterns, Patterns from Nature, Getting it all together and Designs. I haven't had time to sit down and have a really good read of this yet but it explores many ideas for expressing these various ideas with stitch. It looks like a book I'll be able to learn alot from.