Flower Designs (Design Library)

Issue 82

Featuring 100 expertly drawn original black and white line drawings, this book is full of ideas for crafters. Beautiful motifs, bouquets, single flowers, borders and frames adorn the pages, all designed to help create beautiful, innovative works of art such as quilts, stitched pieces, collages, journals, cards, pictures or paintings. From roses to daisies and delphiniums, the designs can be mixed and matched, adapted, scanned, enlarged, reduced or used at the same size.

Mar 13

Flowers are undoubtedly designs popular with artists and craftspeople alike. Used in all forms of media from cards to paintings, fabrics to carvings; flowers have an instant appeal. Judy Balchin has taken the concept and created a source book of 100 designs which can combined or used on their own to make all kinds of projects. Both traditional and contemporary styles are included. Flowers range from roses, sweet peas, lilies to poppies and sunflowers. There are even smiling flowers suitable for children. Many are highly complex designs which would look stunning in embroidery. All the designs are printed in black making them ideal for tracing. You can also use the free CD Rom to print off images on your computer. A very useful book.

Oct 12

Here is the fourth book in Search Press new Design Library. If you are new to this idea then think of the bestselling Design Source Library series and add in a modern extra everything, a CD ROM is also enclosed in the book, both .jpeg and .tiff format. There are a hundred designs in here and this book is an ideal companion to Judy Balchin's other book in this series Heart and Flower Designs (also reviewed on this site). As with all the books the first page contains a brief introduction to the topics and the rest of the book contains just the designs themselves. Each page has a line drawing or two and in this book you can find lots of individual blooms, borders, frames, corners, mandalas and motifs of various sizes. Many of them have an art nouveau style to them, while others are in the style of folk art, Ancient Egypt, India or the Orient to suit a wide variety of projects. Please remember they are not copyright free, but the small print at the back permits you to use up to fifteen of the drawings on a single project as long as you give a quote as to where they came from. It is easy to scale them up or down on the computer and not having to scan them in first certainly cuts down the time you have to spend on the preliminaries of your chosen project. I look forward to seeing the rest of the titles in this user friendly and modern series.

Judy Balchin studied art at Cardiff College of Art. Following this, she specialised in graphic design at Kent Institute of Art and Design in Maidstone.
After working as a graphics assistant at the BBC Television Centre, she joined Adverkit International Ltd as a lettering artist. This began her love affair with letters, producing book jackets, advertising logos and television titles over many years. During this time, she also became involved in the craft world.

She has appeared on television, worked as a craft demonstrator, designed craft kits and run workshops. She has produced more than twenty books on various crafts and is the author of many articles for craft magazines. She continues to enjoy her creative world and is currently working on her latest book.