Textile Portraits

Textile Portraits is an inspiring guide to creating portraits from cloth and stitch, capturing your subjects' appearance and personality and bringing deeper meaning to your textile art.

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.