Embroidery is much more than killing time……

It is a traditional handicraft but at its best it is art. A poet is said to embroidery the truth, while embroidery enriches the cloth. This book combines beautiful ideas complemented by haikus written by the authors brother. Rather than being a stitch encyclopaedia, it is a journey using thread and fresh ideas to embellish your cloth.

Carol Cooke brings a quirky vibe to contemporary embroidery with a passionate approach, clever tips, inspiring examples of her work and the stories behind them. Cooke’s CAN DO attitude permeates the book.

Valerie Kirk, Artist, Tapestry Weaver and Emeritus Professor, Australian National University

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Written By Dr Sharon Peoples

Everyone has a story.

 Capturing that story in any form opens us up to reflection. Reflecting can take us to surprising places and perhaps opens up a path to creativity, if we allow it.

Creativity is about capturing those moments that make life worth living. When we are involved in creativity, we feel that we are living more fully. As a creative person, I am sure Carol can attest to so much joy involved in the creative endeavour. On the other hand, putting our story out there is a risky business. Fortunately Carol’s book lays out for us a guided journey to facilitate stitching our story creatively.

  In Carol’s book Improv Embroidery she has a chapter titled: Telling your Story with Embroidery

Traditional embroidery usually tells us a story ….

 Stitching your own stories is just a step towards a more creative life. Arousing and cultivating curiosity and interest through needle and thread encourages us to take delight in the strange and the unknown. There is no end to the unknown and, also, delight can be endless.

 My favourite Hungarian American psychologist, specialising in creativity, Mee-high Chick sent mee high (Mihaly Csikszentmiahalyi), calls for us to become aware every day of how we are surprised by something, try to surprise at least one person every day, and to write down (or perhaps in this case, stitch) each day what surprised us and how we surprised others. Surprise helps us keep the sense of wonder alive and active. It is the surprise in artwork that holds our attention whereas conformity can flatten our interest. By surprise I don’t mean novelty, but more a sense of being overcome or overpowered by our emotions.

 Just as the sound of a tree crashing in the forest is unheard if nobody is there to hear it, so creative ideas vanish unless there is a record and a receptive audience to receive or implement them - creative people need validity from others. The stitches we put onto to cloth can record our ideas, our emotions, what we are thinking, even our existence.

What Carol has done for us is to find a new way of recording original ideas, getting readers to relax and break traditional boundaries. The meaning of the word surprise in late Middle English was ‘unexpected seizure of a place, or attack on troops’ – seizing the borderlines, the restrictions, to stitch at the frontline.

She call for stitchers to record when something strikes an interest – follow it! Research it, draw it – stitch it! Often an impression is brief, we can be too busy to explore the idea, the imagined image, or the emotion. Not only does she urge us to keep a sketchbook, but she answers the why with the how of maintaining sketchbooks. The world is our business, and we can’t know which part is best suited to our abilities, our selves, our potentialities, unless we make a serious effort to learn about as many aspects of it as possible. Keeping a sketchbook or journal helps us to do this. And taking ideas further in stitch develops our sense of who we are.

 If it is a story about war and conquest, as it was expressed in the Bayeux Tapestry, as it has been through the sunflowers representing the Ukraine. We can use stitch as message – a banner for our disgust, it can become a flag of our own personal rebellion, as a record of our own loss, a badge of our politics. Recording our histories in stitch is not new, but doing it in our own way, in our own colours, in our own stitches is formidable.

Carol calls to be open to what the world is telling us.

Experiential learning – the process of learning through doing, for me is one of the most powerful ways of developing our creativity. In this book she gives readers steps toward a more creative life through the cultivation of curiosity and interest and to learn about stitching by doing.

Pick up some cloth, a jacket, a scarf and old sheet, thread that needle, tie a knot but first get reading and then get stitching!

Who is Dr. Sharon Peoples?

Sharon Peoples has worked as an artist in Canberra for over 20 years, exhibiting nationally and internationally as well as taking on commissioned work.

 In 2003, Sharon completed a graduate diploma in Curatorship and Art History at ANU. She continued studying, graduating with a PHD in 2009 in Art History, writing a thesis on gender and fashion theory. She diverged down the path to academia, teaching and researching in museums studies. However, Sharon began to pick up the threads of her visual arts practice in 2010 after becoming Chair of the Board of Craft ACT. In 2018, she was invited to sit on the board of World Crafts Council (Australia). For six years her my studio practice was part-time but in 2016 Sharon returned to making full-time.

She has had 10 solo exhibitions since 2010, the most recent was Messenger From the Garden (Timeless Textiles, Newcastle). She has also participated in over 20 group exhibitions – the highlights being Surface and Depth (at the Palazzo Velli Expo Rome 2021) and Stitched Art is Art with SEW (Society for Embroidered Work) at the Clerkenwell Gallery, London (2019); as well as the Art Textiles Biennale (2021) at East Gippsland Art Gallery. Peoples’ work has been collected by national (National Gallery of Australia, National Museum of Australia and Parliament House Collection) and state institutions.

In 2020 and again in 2021 Sharon was featured as one of the top 100 international contemporary textile artists by the art textiles social media expert The TextileCurator.