Create beautifully stitched samplers inspired by the subjects closest to your heart - your own home and garden. Any home can make interesting embroidery, and with all the know-how for the beginner and experienced needleworker, Create Your Home in Counted Thread shows you how Sample designs for a variety of house styles, together with explanations and photographs, are provided to guide and inspire. The author revives techniques from the past, combining them with styles of today to stunning effect. A comprehensive section covering an abundance of stitches shows you how to work the threads to suggest texture and to create warmth and interest in the design. Using the careful step-by-step instructions, advice on colour, layout, borders and framing, you can create lovely and unusual samplers featuring your own house and garden.

Mary Jenkins is a self-taught embroiderer and patchworker who teaches in Adult education and runs courses in sampler-making for the Embroiderers' Guild. She is a collector of old samplers and quilts and gains much inspiration from the study of old embroideries and paintings by Victorian garden artists. Although her work is traditional, she tries to update rather than to copy old themes and to use a variety of stitches in an imaginative way. One of her designs, based on an old sampler, is included in Making Samplers, published by David & Charles, and is now in the Embroiderers' Guild Collection. Mary lives in Whitchurch, Cardiff, Wales.