Textile Talk

Kelley graduated from the Royal School of Needlework Apprenticeship in 2005 after many years in Management Development Training. She went on to establish the very successful Bristol branch of the RSN in 2011 and was involved in creating the replacement for the Apprenticeship, known as the Future Tutors Programme. In 2019 she relocated to London to run the course at Hampton Court Palace. One year later she shepherded the School’s tutors through the shift to online teaching during the Covid pandemic and found a new outlet for her embroidery, teaching and IT passions. In 2021 she returned to self-employment and has been teaching online ever since, utilising a wide variety of digital technology to bring the classroom into s...

Amanda Cobbett is an award-winning textile artist with over 25 years’ experience. Inspired by nature in all its forms, Amanda’s 3-dimensional, papier-mâché and free machine-embroidered sculptures are created from her studio in the Surrey Hills. She scours the understorey of the forest floor seeking its hidden treasures. Over time, she has honed an inherent ability to locate intriguing flora in the most unexpected of places.

Amanda’s 3 Dimensional embroidered sculptures appear to float in their Perspex cases and have the feeling of just being collected from the forest for display, very much a modern version of a Victorian pl...

Karen L. Miller, owner of Redbird Quilt Co., is Master Educator for Aurifil USA, an Aurifilosopher, author, and passionate advocate for free motion quilting.

Her quilting journey began in 2007 when her sister invited her to join a simple block of the month program. Karen quickly fell in love with hand appliqué and free motion machine quilting, sparking a passion that would shape her career.

As Karen's enthusiasm for learning and developing her quilting skills grew, she naturally gravitated towards Aurifil's 100% Egyptian cotton threads. The exceptional quality and impressive range of weights and colors captivated her, a...

Gail is a Canadian who resided for 20 years in Britain, until returning t the US in 1995. She moved to Britain in 1976 with her American husband and family. She studied art in Canada, England and Scotland. She completed both parts 1 and 2 (Diploma) of the City & Guilds Design and Embroidery course, achieving a distinction in both parts. She was awarded the Senior Award of Licentiateship (LCGI)by the City & Guilds Institute. Gail has previously taught City & Guilds Embroidery courses and was for many years, a City & Guilds External Verifier for various colleges in the UK. She has authored five books in...

Lorraine has been creating with fiber since she was a young girl. As a child she would while away the hours sewing, crocheting, and working with crewelwork. She learned to sew garments at the side of her mother and paternal grandmother who were both gifted seamstress’. 

She is a self-taught artist. She began quilting in 1997 and immediately was intrigued with the design elements of the quilt. Thus, began her exploration of color, repetition, design, and texture. Soon Lorraine began to experiment with a more contemporary approach to textiles and developed her own artistic voice. Her creative roots are firm...

Lucy Martin from Hand and Lock grew up in the Peak District, where her love for stitching began as she helped her mother make wedding dresses from age three. Her talent led her to work with renowned brands like Alexander McQueen, Burberry, and Catherine Walker. A classically trained embroiderer with a first-class honours degree, Lucy joined Hand & Lock in 2022 as Head of Education. Since then, she has transformed the school into an internationally recognized centre for contemporary embroidery, building a supportive community for students of all levels.

Lucy’s role involves designing and implementing a dynamic educational pr...

Annegret is a German American fiber artist who divides her time between Chapel Hill, a university town, and Kill Devil Hills, a town on the North Atlantic coast. Born in Germany and now residing in North Carolina, she lived in Ghana, France, Great Britain, and Australia before moving to the United States in 2001. Together with travels to countries as varied as Italy and India, these different cultural frameworks have shaped both her life and her art. The shores of the Albemarle Sound, near Kill Devil Hills on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, have become the inspiration for her recent wo...

Sophie is a British wildlife artist who has lived in Africa for 22 years. She now lives in Dorset, England. She is moving to Costa Rica in the new year, where a whole new array of wildlife inspirations await!

Sophie produces her artworks by combining a collage of appliquéd fabrics with free motion embroidery. The details of the animals are sewn over the top of the appliqué collage; there is no pen or paint used.

She uses a heavyweight cotton ground fabric which is painted or dyed with botanical printing.

For the appliqué, Soph...

Althea’s Crome is an Indiana based fiber artist who has chosen a very niche art form to express her artistic ideas and challenge her own skills as a technician.

Crome is a micro-knitter and has been developing her techniques for over 20 years. Using very fine silk threads and needles that she makes herself from surgical stainless steel, she can achieve a gauge of 80 stitches per inch. With so many stitches to the inch, Crome has been able to achieve incredible details in a minute scale. Her tiny pieces of knitting are intended as stand alone, sculptural pie...

UK based textile artist Anne Kelly is an award-winning artist, author and tutor. Her multi-layered and densely stitched textiles have been described as ‘small worlds’. Trained in Canada and at Goldsmiths College in London, she creates wall hangings and objects using a mixture of mixed media collage and hand and machine embroidery. Her inspirations are taken from travel, memory, nature and especially folk art.

Anne tutors and teaches fine art and textiles to a variety of groups in the UK and abroad. and is a member of the Embroiderers Guild UK, the Crafts Council Directory and the Soci...

Holly Guertin is a contemporary fiber artist and textile designer in the Philadelphia, PA area. In her work, she explores the interconnectedness of the human person and invites her viewers to look at sheep and their wool as if in a mirror. In an increasingly disconnected, disembodied, and virtual world, her process-intense work grounds the viewer to the tactile and the real, showing the human experience as a marvel and a wonder. Holly graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) with a BFA in Fibers in 2011 and has been working in textiles and fiber arts ever...

Alison is a self-taught artist who works primarily with textiles, often incorporating mixed media elements into her work to enhance their compositions. She began her journey into textile art in her mid-forties, and since then, her work has continually evolved as she experiments with new techniques and ideas. Her work is a celebration of the natural world, captured through this tactile and versatile medium.

Drawing inspiration from the ever-changing seascapes and landscapes around her, Alison seeks to capture the beauty and tranquillity of nature in each piece she creates. She skilfully combines new and reclaimed fabrics, using...

Jude is a practising mixed media artist and tutor. She currently teaches small groups of 1 or 2 from her own studio, and also larger groups in both the UK and across Europe. She has also exhibited both individually and as part of groups in the UK and in Europe. Jude has taught Masterclasses at Festival of Quilts and worked as the Studio Manager with Leslie Morgan at Committed to Cloth.

Coming from a creative family, she has been ‘making’ for as long as she can recall. Jude has travelled extensively around the world and lived in several different countrie...

The Knitting and Stitching Show at Harrogate Convention Centre runs from the 21st to 24th November 2024, And here’s an exclusive offer just for you: Use the discount code SST when you book to save on your tickets. Simply head over to theknittingandstitchingshow.com/harrogate/sst to secure your spot.

Artist Salley Mavor has spent over 4 decades honing her signature style and working methods, carving out her own niche within the children’s book world and the fiber art community. She creates 3-dimensional hand-stitched artwork with fabric, found objects and a unique combination of embroidery techniques she’s deve...

Dr. Jack Roberts, aka JPR Stitch is a fine artist whose primary medium is freehand machine embroidery. His art is formed from simple organic flowing abstract shapes, but is constructed from a dense and complex web of stitch. His stitchings are a reflection of the calmness, tranquillity and contentedness that he feels when sitting at the sewing machine and creating. Sewing is his meditation and the art emerges from this experience.

“The experience is important to me, it rebalances me, but this sense of balance flows into the art. The colour and pattern have impact, it draws you...

Helen moved from Art to Art Quilting in 2004 and has enjoyed many international awards for her unique approach to machine quilting and creating art quilts. In 16 years of quilting, Helen has won 16 awards at Houston including the inaugural A World of Beauty and Master of Innovative Artistry.

Helen’s work is predominately pictorial, with strong design and exciting play with colour. She uses her painting and design skills and creates whole cloth painted surface and then with her sewing machine, adds movement and detail into the design with her free-motion machine quilting.

Helen literally draws wi...

Sarah de Rousset-Hall is a hand embroidery artist and teacher, she works as a tutor for the Royal School of Needlework and runs her own embroidery business, Sarah Stitches.

Sarah came to embroidery as a second career, but has been embroidering as long as she can remember. Following on from a cancer diagnosis at 30, she returned to being a student a few years later to turn her hobby into a profession.

Sarah graduated from the RSN’s Future Tutor Programme in 2020, and has been working as a professional embroiderer ever since, teaching, developing kits and wo...

Scottish artist Jo Hamilton moved to Portland, Oregon in the early 1990s, after earning her BFA from the Glasgow School of Art. Her technique combines years of fine art practice with the craft of crochet which she learned as a child from her Gran, rendering traditional categories, which include portraiture, landscape and nudes in a contemporary light. Her work has been widely shown in the U.S. and Europe as well as in Beijing, Australia and South Korea, and belongs to museums and private collections in the US and worldwide.

You can view Jo work over on...

Jamie Chalmers, aka Mr X Stitch, aka the Kingpin of Contemporary Embroidery, took up cross stitching fifteen years ago and he’s never looked back.

Since establishing the Mr X Stitch website in 2008, he has been showcasing new talent in the world of needlework and textile art and has curated a number of stitch-based exhibitions in the UK and Ireland. He is the curator of PUSH Stitchery and the author of the Mr X Stitch Guide to Cross Stitch. He is the founder of XStitch, the game-changing cross stitch design magazine and the host of NeedleXChange, a po...

Northern Yarn is an independent wool shop, situated in the historic city of Lancaster, with a stong focus on locally sourced British wool, including their own line produced from the fleeces of local flocks of sheep. Owner Kate Makin works together with local farmers, paying a higher price for good quality fleeces - then follows the process from sheep to skein creating a completely traceable product, using a renewable, local resource. The unique nature of the shop not only attracts visitors from all over the UK, but from visitors worldwide. Kate also organises local events promoting British wool and...

Zoë is a freelance artist, designer & illustrator based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

She has an honours degree in industrial design for textiles (print) and enjoyed a career in graphic design & the creative arts spanning over twenty years. Zoë now focuses on illustration commissions and personal work.

Zoë loves travelling, trying new foods and enjoys lifting weights in the gym. In her work, nature is Zoë's main source of inspiration and she uses a range of techniques in her work both traditional and digital.

Represented by her US agent, Lilla Rogers Studio, Zoë has happil...

Gail chats with Debbie and Di from Appletons Wools. Appletons brand of crewel and tapestry wool has been used for nearly 200 years across the globe in some of the most prestigious tapestries and embroideries in cathedrals, stately homes, and government buildings.

Founded in 1835 by Thomas Appleton, Appletons is just as evangelical about British wool today as he was back then. All 425 colours are dyed and spun in Yorkshire and the wool is 100% British.

The range, which is available in crewel, 2 ply and tapestry, 4 ply yarn still incorporates all the William Morris shades as well as...

Cas Holmes is a British artist, author and tutor of Romani heritage specialising in textile work with found materials. She trained in fine art and is interested  in interdisciplinary  projects in community and gallery settings to demonstrate the accessibility of mixed media textile processes.  Her practice centres on the use of sustainable materials and themes surrounding issues of  identity and place. Research in traditional paper and textile crafts in Japan and India continue to inform her practice and writing  (Winston Churchill Fellowship, Japan Foundation Fellowship and Arts Council England Professional Development Award). 

She collaborates with organisations and projec...

The Nettle Dress is a modern fairy tale about the healing power of nature and craft directed by BAFTA-nominated filmmaker Dylan Howitt, released by Dartmouth Films in cinemas across the UK and Ireland from September 15.

Textile artist Allan Brown spends seven years making a dress from scratch, using 14,400 feet of thread made from the fibre of locally foraged stinging nettles. In doing so, he relearns ancient crafts of foraging, spinning, weaving, cutting and sewing. Making a dress this way becomes devotional, helping Allan to survive the death of his wife, which leaves him and their four children bereft.

Meredith Woolnough is a professional artist working out of her studio in Newcastle Australia. She is best known for her sculptural embroideries which are an exploration of art, science and nature. The embroideries are created using a unique freehand embroidery technique that utilises a domestic sewing machine and a fabric that dissolves in water.

The work explores the beauty and fragility of nature, sparking a sense of wonder and appreciation of the natural world. Meredith believes that the deeper our appreciation for the aesthetics of nature the more eager we are to immerse ourselves in it and...

Christen Brown was born in Manhattan Beach, California. She first became interested in fiber arts via making clothing for her dolls as a child. After graduating from high school, she continued her education at the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising in Los Angeles, California, where she graduated with an associate in arts in fashion design. 

Christen began her career in the wearable art field in 1986. Her work has been shown in galleries and fashion shows all over the world. She has been invited to participate in both the Fairfield and BERNINA Fashion Shows. 

Christen began te...

Joining Gail on this episode is Graham Stewart, who is an international textile and apparel production fibre specialist.

For the past two years, Graham has developed and patented a more sustainable process to bleach and dye cotton called Fibre 52.

Fibre52 is an environmentally kind and cost-conscious process for dyeing cotton. It is a simple, inexpensive replacement for traditional and outdated cotton preparation methods. It uses natural products instead of heavy chemicals, working at lower temperatures, with less energy, less water, and a shorter processing time. This makes Fibre52 a wonderfully cost-effective, eco-conscious and sustainable bleach...

Gail chats to Mistianne Guzman, who has been quilting since she was 25 years old and was going crazy for some color.  She then walked into a store that had fabric and the rest is history. 

Mistianne is mostly self-taught.  She not only creates quilts for the joy of it (the smaller the pieces the better), but also for competition, having had her quilts travel all over the world. One of her quilts was used in a yearly calendar for clients. She has completed a skill stage 4 programme with School of Stitched Textiles in patchwork and quilting and has...

Ruth qualified as a Graphic Designer at Leeds Metropolitan University, specialising in illustration, in 1986. She then gained a teaching qualification at Manchester University.

She has spent many years as an Art teacher working in high schools and tertiary Colleges.

She now shares a studio with her partner Stuart Gray at Farfield Mill in Sedbergh, Cumbria, where they work, teach, and sell their paintings. You can find out more about Ruth or see her work on her website. Ruth also tutors an online video course for us on Drawing for Design.

Susan makes sculptural textile work combining mixed-media practices with fabric and embroidery across digital and manual platforms. She exploits the physics of light as it interacts with the structure of the triangular embroidery thread. The light scatters in multiple directions off the sides of the thread, creating different tones and saturations of the base color. She also exploits the science of optics, relying on our brain’s ability to optically mix spots of color in close physical proximity. Further relying on the principles of color as taught by Joseph Albers and Johannes Itten et al, she exploits the vibratory ef...

Gail and Debbie are chatting about how Debbie became interested in crafts, her favourite techniques, teaching online versus in the classroom, tips for getting the best from your tutor and how the group zoom sessions work.

Dr Gail Cowley talking about School of Stitched Textiles and how their distance learning courses work.