A creative and beautiful book packed with inspiring ideas to help you capture likenesses and explore personalities in stitch, from a well-loved textile artist.

Anne Kelly’s evocative and nostalgic work often incorporates portraits—of friends, family, historical figures, and even pets. Within these pages she shares her approach to textile portraiture, bringing in a wealth of different embroidery techniques, including hand and machine embroidery, quilting, and appliqué, to render in cloth the nuances of facial expressions and the personalities of her subjects. The book covers:

• Selfies at Home: making the perfect self-portrait in cloth.
• Representation and Culture: how portraits have been used in textile art for cultural expression around the world.
• Stylized Imagery: going beyond the traditional portrait into abstraction.
• Place and Time: creating a sense of place with portraiture, sometimes incorporating photographs.
• Story and Text: how to create a fuller narrative with deeply personal ephemera and related imagery.
• Pet Projects: immortalizing your pets in your textile work.

About The Author

Anne Kelly is a textile artist and tutor. She trained in Canada and the UK and now teaches and speaks to guilds and groups. Her work is exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions, including private collections in the UK and abroad, the Vatican Collection in Rome, and at the Textile Museum of Canada in Toronto. She was artist-in-residence at Sussex Prairie Garden in West Sussex and exhibited at the international World of Threads Festival and the Prague Patchwork Meeting. She is the author of three books published by Batsford, Textile Nature, Textile Folk Art, and Textile Travels, and was the co-author of Connected Cloth with Cas Holmes. She lives in Tunbridge Wells, Kent.