Unfolding Cloth by Hannah Lamb

Hannah Lamb explores many creative ways to incorporate historical textiles into your own work, from first conception and initial research to the finished piece. Chapters cover:

• Unfolding: how to track down historical textiles in shops, markets, antiques fairs, museum collections and online, or in your own family scrap bag, and how to conduct thorough and meaningful research into them.
• Connecting: how to design and plan your work with historical textiles, starting with mood boards and sketchbooks and progressing to practical creative experimentation, including old-fashioned techniques such as the ‘prick and pounce’ method of pattern transfer, popular in Tudor times.
• Making: the practicalities of using old and fragile materials in your work, and how to combine them with newer fabrics to make cohesive and beautiful pieces that tell powerful stories. This chapter also explores alternative ideas, such as digital printing, that allow you to import the fabric’s essence but leave the original piece intact.
• Gathering: this chapter considers examples of contemporary artworks that respond to textile heritage and place, and studies how we tell histories and whose perspective we tell them from.

This thoughtful, imaginative book is illustrated with inspirational examples of the author’s own work and that of other leading textile artists, and provides a valuable introduction to working with historical textiles to enhance your own pieces of textile art.

Hardback, 128pp

Published by Batsford