The events of your life, from local walks to exotic trips, can provide endless inspiration for textile art. This inspiring book shows you how to record your experiences, using sketchbooks, journals and photography, to create personal narratives that can form a starting point for more finished stitched-textile pieces.

Acclaimed textile artist and teacher Cas Holmes, whose work is often inspired by her life and the journeys she makes, helps you find inspiration through your own life and explains how to record what you see in sketchbooks and journals, which can often become beautiful objects in themselves. She explains how you can use photography, both as documentation and as inspiration, and sometimes incorporate it into the work itself, along with found objects and ephemera.

Throughout the book are useful techniques that can be harnessed to add extra interest to your work, such as methods for making layered collages, how to 'sketch' with stitch, and advice on design and colour. If you want to create beautiful, unique work inspired by your life and travels, this is the perfect book for you.

About The Author

Cas Holmes is one of UK’s most renowned textile artists. She exhibits widely and runs courses at West Dean College in West Sussex. She is the author of Textile Landscape, Stitch Stories, The Found Object in Textile Art and Connected Cloth, also published by Batsford. She has also written for magazines and websites including Embroidery, The Quilter and TextileArtist and for the The Festival of Quilts. She lives in Maidstone, Kent.