Discover the haunted side of stitching with Meg Black. Bewitch your home with patterns inspired by gothic art, Halloween curiosities, haunted holidays and witchy oddities.

Featuring 25 projects for all abilities, new and seasoned stitchers are welcome here.

– Stitch your own spooky abode, or ghosts and ghouls to adorn your walls.
– Create a garden of carnivorous plants, or a vintage Halloween carnival.
– Bring haunted twists to Halloween and your favorite holidays with a gingerdead house at Creepmas and skeleton bunnies for Easterween.

With everything you need on how to get started – key material lists, easy-to-follow charts and all of Meg’s stitching tricks – this grimoire is your essential stitchcraft companion.

‘Making Matters celebrates the joy of the handmade in all of its wonderful variety. In a fast paced world, it is a timely and beautiful exploration of making traditions. I loved it!’
Kate Strasdin, author of The Dress Diary of Mrs Anne Sykes

As children, we made things: snowmen, paper boats, eccentrically costumed plays. That making fired our minds and imaginations – it altered our small worlds and shaped who we became. But as adults, it is hard to find to find the space for creativity and to remember its power.

Exploring craft traditions and forms of making from across centuries and cultures, Clare Hunter encourages to engage with the world afresh. To use our hands again, to see beauty in unexpected places, to play and protest and embrace imaginative possibilities. From paper crafts to wonders made from light and snow, she searches for creative delight – making lanterns, puppets and pinhole cameras.

Inspiring and fascinating, Making Matters celebrates individual and collective creativity. It blends history, culture and politics with rich storytelling, wonderful characters and tales of remarkable objects. Read this, and then make something.

PRAISE FOR THREADS OF LIFE:
“An astonishing feat . . . Her highly impressive debut is a richly textured and moving record of a history that has largely being lost” Sunday Times

“Enthralling…beautiful… An inspiring and moving sideways look at history” Sunday Express

“A beautifully considered book . . . Clare Hunter has managed to mix the personal with the political with moving results” Tracy Chevalier

Renowned British textile artists Cas Holmes and Deena Beverley, each well known for their richly textured, deeply evocative work in stitch, collaborate for the first time in this important and timely book. Beautifully illustrated with a wealth of work from both artists along with other embroiderers and textile artists from around the world, Soulful Stitch documents a wide range of stitched responses to crisis, both personal and global.

Both authors have recent lived experience of having to navigate new paths through big life challenges, making this book particularly heartfelt. It truly demonstrates how even in the toughest times, creativity in textile art can keep you afloat.

In this richly illustrated book, textile artist Ekta Kaul explores the history of the kantha tradition and finds objects of extraordinary beauty. She goes on to look at how the kantha spirit is inspiring artists today and discusses creative techniques to help you develop your own interpretations, alongside a dictionary of fundamental kantha stitches with supporting images and instructions.

Steeped in the ethos of sustainability, emotional repair and mindful making, kantha will lead you to uncover a slower and more thoughtful approach to stitching.

Enter a workshop filled with expert craftspeople as they bring loved pieces of family history and the memories they hold back to life.

Each expert explains their craft, the reason they love it so much and how they go about restoring and reviving your precious objects, from a Ukrainian suitcase to a matchstick clock, using crafts as varied as leatherwork, woodwork, metalwork, art and ceramic restoration.

In sixteenth-century Europe women’s voices were suppressed and silenced. Even for a queen like Mary, her prime duty was to bear sons. In an age when textiles expressed power, Mary exploited them to emphasise her female agency. From her lavishly embroidered gowns as the prospective wife of the French Dauphin to the fashion dolls she used to encourage a Marian style at the Scottish court and the subversive messages she embroidered in captivity for her supporters, Mary used textiles to advance her political agenda, affirm her royal lineage and tell her own story.

In this eloquent cultural biography, Clare Hunter exquisitely blends history, politics and memoir to tell the story of a queen in her own voice.