Textile Artist: Expressive Stitches

Book excerpt: Transform your ideas on creative fabric embellishment for textile art that's full meaning and astounding texture, in this inspiring book by award-winning textile art tutor and artist Jan Dowson. Whether it's a landscape, a garden, an animal or a powerful memory of a place or object, Jan shows you how she develops them all into beautifully stitched representations that exude awe-inspiring detail, colour and expression. Discover Jan's unique sketchbook process, where she stores and collects natural items, and explores different patterns, textures, media and markings to cultivate her final design. See her simple yet effective methods for transforming her fabric for stitching, including dyeing, embellishing and stamping. Then, watch her transform an unassuming square of fabric into a contemporary piece of art brimming with colour, texture and extraordinary stitched markings - all made through the combination of traditional sewing techniques and other media. Following a fascinating, illustrated step-by step chapter on Jan's key techniques, join her as she takes you through the stages of three types of work for which she is most renowned - the stitched landscape, the memory cloth and the bird sculpture. Each project also includes a break down of the materials, tools and techniques used, so that can understand as well as see the development of her astounding, mixed-media creations. Throughout the book, a gallery of Jan's work complements her techniques and projects, showing how to truly push the limits on your stitcheries. These are stunning pieces that will open your eyes and turn your own creative concepts into original, personal work.