Textile Creativity Through Nature: Felt, Texture, and Stitch

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Practical ideas for rewilding your creative practice.

Internationally renowned textile artist Jeanette Appleton takes both budding and more experienced felters through a series of ideas for working with nature to nurture creativity, inspire, and make us more sustainable artists. Creating exciting felt surfaces that are both beautiful and versatile, she demonstrates how to capture the nuances of nature—lines of sea, hedge, and grass, cracks in parched earth, light on early morning dew, frosted puddles—and translate them into subtleties of texture and stitch.

Exploring a variety of strategies for overcoming artists’ block, the book is packed with practical ideas for rewilding your creative practice: changing the routes and patterns of your local environment to bring natural patterns into your own work; revisiting past diaries and sketchbooks to find lines, threads, and stitches that lead the way forward; transforming recycled cloth by bonding memories, mixed-media, and found objects into your work; making cuts and slits in the layers of fabric to reveal the secret strata of nature and the fragility of the planet beneath.

Felt is an incredibly versatile medium, allowing control and creativity that ready-made fabrics cannot replicate. Appleton constantly challenges the felt process on this fascinating journey, discovering a new working practice through our connection with the outside world—and to reconnect where nature and creativity meet.