Coloring books are a great source for embroidery design inspiration. We’ve discussed this before a couple times – the Secret Garden Hummingbirds are an example of how a coloring book page can turn into an embroidery design.

This is The Thing: we don’t necessarily all have the talent to draw well. We might love embroidery, we might yearn to embroider something other than designs in kits and the like, but we might not necessarily have the knack for drawing the things we might want to stitch.

But an embroiderer can certainly take advantage of this Era of the Grown-Up Coloring Book. These advanced and intricate coloring books are wildly popular right now, and you can find many good ones by many different artists widely available today.

If you purchase a coloring book, you can turn the designs in the book into embroidery projects, as long as they’re for your own personal use. There’s nothing wrong with this, and there’s no violation of copyright or anything like that.

I’ve had questions about that with the Secret Garden embroidery: Do I have to write to the author or publisher to get permission to embroider a design in that book? The answer is no. If you buy the book, and if you’re using the design for personal use only, you can embroidery it, you can color it, you can etch it onto glass or carve it onto wood. You just can’t reproduce the design and sell it, or sell items made with the design on it.

Here are two coloring books that you might enjoy using for embroidery designs, ideas, and inspiration. One is Johanna Basford’s second book (I reviewed her first book Secret Garden: An Inky Treasure Hunt here), Enchanted Forest; and the second is Millie Marotta’s Animal Kingdom. I’ll tell you what you’ll find in both of them, and discuss the designs a little bit from an embroiderer’s perspective.