Textile Creativity Through Nature: Felt, Texture and Stitch
Jeanette Appleton
New ideas for working with nature to nurture creativity in felted and embroidered textile art.
Immerse yourself in nature and rewild your creative practice with inspiration from textile artist Jeanette Appleton. With a focus on the versatile medium of felt, she takes readers through a series of ideas for working with nature to boost creativity, inspire, and make us more sustainable as artists. The book covers:
• How to capture the nuances of nature through creating exciting felt surfaces – lines of sea, frosted puddles, hedge and grass – and how to translate them into subtleties of texture and stitch.
• Transforming recycled cloth by bonding memories, mixed-media and found objects into your work.
• Cutting and repairing techniques: making cuts and slits in the layers of fabric to reveal the secret strata of nature beneath, echoing the planet’s fragility.
• How to make the best use of sketchbooks, maps and mapping to record inspiration from time spent in nature.
• A variety of strategies for overcoming artist’s block, from revisiting past diaries and sketchbooks to interacting differently with your local environment.
Throughout, the author constantly challenges the felt process, discovering a new creative working practice through connecting with the outside world.
Richly illustrated with exciting examples of the author’s beautiful and reflective work, this inspirational and practical guide will appeal to textile and felt artists of all levels.
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, and 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.