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If you haven't heard of Elsa Williams, you haven't done much needlepoint. Her kits are famous, and she has a brand of yarn. The book of course uses all her yarn and lists the numbers of her yarn colors. However, you can easily use other brands of yarn, typically in graduated shades of a color to work her patterns. As a maker of patterns, Williams doesn't encourage color variation or try to help you design your own work. But she does show you pattern after pattern, the classics, and give you an introduction on the name "bargello," which was taken from some chairs in this kind of needlepoint in the Bargello museum in Italy. She shows the chair in the introduction, and the cover is the exact pattern of the chair redone with her yarn. Her advice is excellent, although an odd aspect of using black-and-white photos is that they highlight the few places where the wool hasn't yet expanded to cover the canvas completely. Although the stitching is excellent and the blocking perfect, the specks of white in the black-and-white photos is oddly distracting. These photos are also hard to follow. Most of the same patterns are in other books, like Bargello Magic or Bargello: A Golden Hands Pattern Book, which I use instead to follow the pattern since the images are in color. The 16 color plates in Williams book are wonderful and easy to follow; there's 56 patterns in total. In short, a good book, but the lack of color photos is a big drawback for the 21st-century reader.

If you haven't heard of Elsa Williams, you haven't done much needlepoint. Her kits are famous, and she has a brand of yarn. The book of course uses all her yarn and lists the numbers of her yarn colors. However, you can easily use other brands of yarn, typically in graduated shades of a color to work her patterns. As a maker of patterns, Williams doesn't encourage color variation or try to help you design your own work. But she does show you pattern after pattern, the classics, and give you an introduction on the name "bargello," which was taken from some chairs in this kind of needlepoint in the Bargello museum in Italy. She shows the chair in the introduction, and the cover is the exact pattern of the chair redone with her yarn. Her advice is excellent, although an odd aspect of using black-and-white photos is that they highlight the few places where the wool hasn't yet expanded to cover the canvas completely. Although the stitching is excellent and the blocking perfect, the specks of white in the black-and-white photos is oddly distracting. These photos are also hard to follow. Most of the same patterns are in other books, like Bargello Magic or Bargello: A Golden Hands Pattern Book, which I use instead to follow the pattern since the images are in color. The 16 color plates in Williams book are wonderful and easy to follow; there's 56 patterns in total. In short, a good book, but the lack of color photos is a big drawback for the 21st-century reader.