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Textile art sampling 101

I don’t like buying shoes online. That may seem like a bizarre way to open an article about textile art but stick with me. Looking at pictures on a website, you can get a pretty good idea of the tone of the leather, the height of the heel, the detail ...

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Could sampling be your creative super power?

Are you one of those textile artists who has constant creative epiphanies? When one artwork is complete, the muse magically appears to deliver a fully formed concept or design for the next. And does that ‘divine intervention’ stay strong and true as you sa ...

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Ann Brauer: Tool kit

Ann Brauer has been combining the traditions of quilt making and contemporary concepts of art to create her abstract landscapes for the last 34 years. In this article, Ann selects 5 tools that she uses to make her beautiful designs. We learn about their place ...

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Why lack of clarity is destroying your creative confidence

This is the story of Janie. Janie has just celebrated her 57th birthday. She’s an ‘aspiring’ textile artist. ‘Aspiring’ because she tends to ‘look’ rather than ‘do’. She spends hours browsing textile art online and ends up b ...

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The artistic power of appliqué

appliqué  |əˈpliːkeɪ| noun decorative work in which one piece of cloth is sewn or fixed onto another What do you think when you hear the word ‘appliqué’? The dictionary definition doesn’t quite do it for me. I guess, in the most basic ...

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Judy Merchant: Tool kit

Judy trained in Textiles and Fine Art at Canterbury College of Art in the 60s and 70s and after qualifying as an art teacher, her career took her away from her art practice. Ten years ago she returned to developing her own work and has exhibited regularly ever ...

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5 questions to revive your practice & reinvigorate your art

A fable Once upon a time there lived a mother and a daughter. The mother loved textiles but hardly found time for her passion. She was too busy looking after her family and holding down a job. The daughter loved textiles too – she’d inherited that from her ...

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Creating texture and pattern with stitch

Think of a piece of textile art you admire. Really see it in your mind’s eye. Picture the intricacy of the textures. The complexity of the patterns.  Do you feel daunted? Unable to fathom how to start building such beautiful textural effects? Such mesm ...

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Sylvie Franquet: Reconstructing with stitch

Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, the Flanders region of Belgium functioned as the centre of European tapestry production, commended for their particularly large textile works filled to the brim with intricate, painstaking detail. Flemish artist Sylvi ...

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Ruth Lee: From conception to creation

Connecting the threads; creating a narrative through the language of textiles. Communicating ideas but not always telling the whole of the story. Intriguing; tantalising; posing questions; drawing in the viewer to invent their own storyline, which may or may n ...

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