Embroiderers' Guild bookshop

I had a brief trip to London before Christmas - just in time to see my grandson Jake turn one. On the big day Jake had a lovely party at a local play centre with his friend Zak and the two boys had a wonderful time riding on the rocking horses and sliding down the little toddler sized slide.

Somehow on previous visits to London I had always missed going to the Embroiderers' Guild bookshop even though it was at the top of my list of things to do. I wanted to go because specialist embroidery books are quite scarce in the bookshops in Cape Town and over the years the EG bookshop was reputed to be a treasure trove of embroidery books.

Recently the EG has moved from Hampton Court Palace to Walton-on-Thames. After phoning ahead to make sure they were open, my daughter and I went along hoping to see their large stock of embroidery books. We found the house in Kings Road quite easily - on a sunny but bitterly cold day. Later that afternoon we had light snow, but it was too wet to last long enough to take any photos of it. I was glad to get inside out of the freezing wind.

It turned out that the bookshop is no longer open to the public. It is now an Internet-based e-bookshop and the books are housed elsewhere.

I was disappointed that I couldn't page through some of the books that I was interested in, but among the small stock of books remaining at the Guild, I did manage to find two Gail Marsh books on 18th and 19th Century embroidery that I am now very pleased to have on my bookshelf. You can see how purposefully I am clutching my precious purchase!

More about my visit to the EG in my next post. Till then, Happy Stitching!