SHORTLISTED in The Creative Book Awards 2024.

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.

• Narratives: how to create a fuller story using deeply personal ephemera and related imagery.

• Pet Projects: immortalising your pets in your textile work.

Beautifully illustrated with stunning examples of her own work and that of intriguing textile artists who specialise in portraiture from around the world, this is the ideal book for embroiderers and textile artists who want to introduce this often tricky subject area into their work.



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.

Introduction 6

Chapter 1: Selfies at Home 8

Chapter 2: Representation and Culture 28

Chapter 3: Stylized Imagery 48

Chapter 4: Place and Time 68

Chapter 5: Narratives 86

Chapter 6: Pets and Animals 106

Conclusion 120

Featured Artists and Contributors 122

For Investigation 124

Further Reading 125

Suppliers 126

Acknowledgements 127

Index 128