Fabric Memory Books

Combine your love of crafting, fabric, and reading to create unique volumes for preserving your memories. The 24 projects feature a variety of binding methods as well as inventive techniques like transferring photos onto textiles.

A sequel to the best-selling Shibori', this text provides a modern perspective on shaped-resist dyeing techniques in textile design. Japan's top fashion designers are examined, including Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake and a 96-page section features the work of 24 international artists. A sequel to the best-selling 'Shibori', this text provides a modern perspective on shaped-resist dyeing techniques in textile design. Japan's top fashion designers are examined, including Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake and a 96-page section features the work of 24 international artists.'

A new edition of the best-selling fabric guide includes all-new updated information on the selection of the best fabrics for a variety of projects and how to make the most of them, including new tips and more than three hundred color photographs.

Offers vital information on choosing fabrics and creating patterns through basic sewing techniques. After learning how to make various styles of fabric books, readers will learn embellishment techniques that include painting, writing, decorative stitching, machine and hand embroidery, print and transfer techniques.

Once hanging static in a wardrobe or folded away in a trunk, in recent times clothes have found themselves thrown into the spotlight. The crowds that are drawn to large scale fashion exhibitions staged with increasing frequency in galleries and museums around the world offer glimpses into the meaning that we attach to these items of clothing. Apart from their aesthetic value, clothes have the ability to evoke issues of identity, of the relation of self to body and self to the world. We are able to find ourselves through the experiences of delving into our wardrobes and remembering. Clothes are thus layered with meaning since they have the power to act as memory prompts. Woven into their fabric are traces of past experiences; stitched into their seams are links to people we have loved and lost. Viewed as visual objects, clothing is not frivolous, flippant or foolish. In telling and talking about clothes, we reveal much about ourselves, our lives and the experiences that we drape around our bodies. Whether bought or handmade, passed down or reconstructed, clothes help us to construct meaning as we remember those things in our lives that matter.

From Paleolithic flax to 3D knitting, explore the global history of textiles and the world they weave together in this enthralling and educational guide. The story of humanity is the story of textiles -- as old as civilization itself. Since the first thread was spun, the need for textiles has driven technology, business, politics, and culture. In The Fabric of Civilization, Virginia Postrel synthesizes groundbreaking research from archaeology, economics, and science to reveal a surprising history. From Minoans exporting wool colored with precious purple dye to Egypt, to Romans arrayed in costly Chinese silk, the cloth trade paved the crossroads of the ancient world. Textiles funded the Renaissance and the Mughal Empire; they gave us banks and bookkeeping, Michelangelo's David and the Taj Mahal. The cloth business spread the alphabet and arithmetic, propelled chemical research, and taught people to think in binary code. Assiduously researched and deftly narrated, The Fabric of Civilization tells the story of the world's most influential commodity.

This globe-spanning history of sewing and embroidery, culture and protest, is “an astonishing feat . . . richly textured and moving” (The Sunday Times, UK). In 1970s Argentina, mothers marched in headscarves embroidered with the names of their “disappeared” children. In Tudor, England, when Mary, Queen of Scots, was under house arrest, her needlework carried her messages to the outside world. From the political propaganda of the Bayeux Tapestry, World War I soldiers coping with PTSD, and the maps sewn by schoolgirls in the New World, to the AIDS quilt, Hmong story clothes, and pink pussyhats, women and men have used the language of sewing to make their voices heard, even in the most desperate of circumstances. Threads of Life is a chronicle of identity, memory, power, and politics told through the stories of needlework. Clare Hunter, master of the craft, threads her own narrative as she takes us over centuries and across continents—from medieval France to contemporary Mexico and the United States, and from a POW camp in Singapore to a family attic in Scotland—to celebrate the universal beauty and power of sewing.

Creating unique textile art using vintage cloth and embroidery to tell a story and preserve memories Vintage cloth, found objects, embroidery, layered cloth and hand-stitching are all artfully combined by Tilly Rose to create unique textile artworks that tell a story, record a special event, or preserve, display and celebrate a memory of a special person or place. Tilly describes how to create these textile artworks using scraps of fabric, thread, lace, ribbon, buttons, beads, photographs and other found items that readers either already own or have sourced from elsewhere. The projects take various forms, including cloth journals, lavender hearts, hoop art, framed collages, wall hangings and miniature quilts, and involve a variety of easy techniques that are explained through step-by-step demos at the start of the book. These include layering and collage, hand embroidery, creating your own fabrics, transferring your designs to cloth, stamping on cloth, appliqué, embellishing, patchwork, quilting, free motion embroidery and photo transfer. Create a textile artwork using fabric and items from your wedding, a child's first birthday, a Christening or your honeymoon, or even family heilooms that can be cherished in a new way. The whole focus of the book is on inspiration and experimentation - encouraging the reader to be creative, collecting and sourcing materials of special significance and incorporating them into textile artworks that become treasured keepsakes.

A magnificent work of original research that unravels history through textiles and cloth—how we make it, use it, and what it means to us. How is a handmade fabric helping save an ancient forest? Why is a famous fabric pattern from India best known by the name of a Scottish town? How is a Chinese dragon robe a diagram of the whole universe? What is the difference between how the Greek Fates and the Viking Norns used threads to tell our destiny? In Fabric, bestselling author Victoria Finlay spins us round the globe, weaving stories of our relationship with cloth and asking how and why people through the ages have made it, worn it, invented it, and made symbols out of it. And sometimes why they have fought for it. She beats the inner bark of trees into cloth in Papua New Guinea, fails to handspin cotton in Guatemala, visits tweed weavers at their homes in Harris, and has lessons in patchwork-making in Gee's Bend, Alabama - where in the 1930s, deprived of almost everything they owned, a community of women turned quilting into an art form. She began her research just after the deaths of both her parents —and entwined in the threads she found her personal story too. Fabric is not just a material history of our world, but Finlay's own journey through grief and recovery.