I picked up Two-Hour Cross-Stitch: Flowers from Amazon recently because it was at a rather good price. 300 lovely designs that seem very easy to stitch, and will look lovely as little motifs on hairbands and the like. I also enjoyed the layout of the book - no nonsense, gridded in coloured squares and a stitched example right beside. Threads colours used are DMC.
The 300 designs come in several chapters: Deco, Fantasy, Formal, Traditional and Monograms & Messages. It's not all flowers per se too, there are some little fans, fruits, baskets, portraits and etc.
Overall, I am rather pleased with the book. 300 designs that seem very easy and gratifying to stitch, and easily completed in a few hours per motif, tops. The only bugbear is that there aren't any finishing ideas in the book, so you probably need to have some ideas in mind!
To test the two-hour claim, I stitched design 94 from it, a stylised flower with a little blue background. I didn't have the colours recommended in the colour code in my stash, so I just used the most visually similar colours.
At the end of two hours, this is what I had...
About 85% done with the design!
And finished:
For some reason, the last 15% took me another hour by itself. I think it was because I had to deal with confetti stitches and I'm picky enough that I change my threads if the jump is more than around three stitches away. I also had some strange issues with the fabric, as I decided not to use the hoop for this particular motif.
Some time ago, I commented that messy stitches on the back annoy me, and someone asked me how neat mine are. Here's the back of this flower.
Yeah, it's not the neatest stitching on earth, but you can probably see that my confetti stitches are by themselves and most of the sections are pretty neat.
I finished this into a little pincushion thingum. Not too pleased with it, but it'll do.
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