Meet the  Artists

September 2023 

 

Amy Maricle

Making Your Art Permission Slip

Amy is an artist and art therapist who is fascinated by the connections between nature and art. In her classes in art journaling, painting, book making, and paper cutting, she teaches students to slow down and co-create with nature, using a playful creative process to find more joy and meaning. She is the author of Draw Yourself Calm: Draw Slow Stress Less.

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Arounna Khounnoraj

Dye, Stitch and Sew

Arounna Khounnoraj is a Canadian artist and maker working in Toronto where she immigrated with her family from Laos at the age of four. While her education includes a master’s degree in fine arts in sculpture and ceramics, it was through subsequent residencies that she found her current focus in fibre arts. In 2002 she started bookhou, a multi-disciplinary studio with her husband John Booth, where Arounna explores screen printing and a variety of textile techniques such as embroidery and punch needle. She creates objects such as bags, home goods and textile art.

Arounna has written and published three books with a focus on Textile design and processes, with a fourth + fifth book launching late 2023 called Contemporary Patchwork: Techniques in Color, Surface Design & Sewing, followed by Winter Celebrations, A modern guide to a handmade Christmas. Learn more about Arounna at bookhou.com, her books and follow her on Instagram for inspiration at @bookhou.

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Bianca Springer

Playing with Embroidered Hair Textures!

Bianca Springer is a garment sewist, pattern designer, international sewing instructor, experimental quilter and fiber artist. Bianca is a contributing writer for Sew News magazine and Creative Machine Embroidery magazine. She is the creator of unique sewing pattern weights to improve sewing efficiency and speed.

Bianca uses her creative voice to speak to disparity in the craft industry. She has served on diversity panels and advises brands on ways to improve diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. After seeing her voice and stories excluded from mainstream embroidery books, Bianca chose to fill the void. Bianca is the author of the newly released book, Represent! Embroidery. Stitch 10 Colorful Projects & 100 Designs Featuring a Full Range of Shapes, Skin Tones & Hair Textures.

Bianca shares her talents as a brand ambassador for Baby Lock USA, Shannon Fabrics, Nature’s Fabric and is an Arrow Creator. Bianca has served as an instructor at QuiltCon; The Festival of Quilts in Birmingham UK; Woodlawn Pope 60th Anniversary Needlework Show and for various quilt guilds.  Bianca’s work and creative journey has been shared on Black Women Stitch podcast, Craft Industry Alliance podcast, Sew Organised Style podcast, Create Whimsy, Threads magazine, Seamwork, Love Crafts, Love Embroidery, Simply Sewing, and The Bahamas Tribune. 

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Clarissa Grandi

Parabolic Paper Stitching

Clarissa  is  a  geometric  artist,  author,  and  experienced  teacher.  First  and  foremost  an  educator,  her  passion  is  introducing  beginner  artists  to  the  truly  accessible  art  of  geometry.  She  delights  in  sharing  her  ideas,  materials,  and  techniques  with  others,  and  her  background  in  mathematics  teaching  enables  her  to  demonstrate  and  explain  difficult  concepts  simply  and  clearly.  In  her  own  artmaking  she  enjoys  exploring  the  interplay  between  the  precision  of  human-made  geometry  and  the  more  organic  and  chaotic  geometries  and  symmetries  found  in  nature. She often includes paper stitching in her work, where it complements and enhances the geometry of her mixed media pieces. 

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Deborah Fisher

Small Felt Boxes

Deborah Fisher is a designer of handmade things, an object maker, and an idea generator. She is the curator, docent, ring master & juggler at Fish Museum + Circus, where you will find charming miscellany for makers & creatives, including fabric, sewing patterns, limited edition ceramics and more. She is quite fond of cocoa, daffodils, and cinnamon toast. Deborah lives with her nifty husband, two magical teenage daughters, two cats, one super mutt, and a bunch of noisy chickens on Long Island, NY.

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Elnaz Yazdani

Rethinking Embroidery

Elnaz Yazdani is an embroidery artist and educator based in Yorkshire. Elnaz is dedicated to sharing her textile skills and promoting the importance of embroidery as an art form for the future and for community wellbeing.

Elnaz has taught embroidery throughout her community, within primary, secondary and higher education as well as community groups and organisations.

In 2020 Elnaz was commended for the teaching excellence award in embroidery via the Embroiderers Guild and became an Embroiderers Guild Scholar after the successful launch of her virtual embroidery school ‘Embroider Your Future’.

Her practice explores ways of transforming traditional embroidery techniques through her choice of unusual materials; she is inspired by industrial, upcycled materials and the ways in which she can embellish, connect or transform these items through stitch to develop a surface or form. Her unique embroidery style has allowed her to work across fashion, jewellery and installation contexts since graduating from Manchester School of Art in 2014.

Elnaz is available for workshops, talks, embroidery and jewellery commissions, exhibitions and collaborative projects.

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Emma Freeman

Create a Healing Meditation Cloth

Emma Freeman is a Massage Therapist, Reiki Master, Meditation Teacher and Poet. She use healing touch and guided meditation practices to help people go inward and connect more deeply with themselves to discover insight, clarity, peace, transformation and healing. Emma is inspired by the powers of silence, stillness, solitude, community, wonder, love, touch, intuition and nature to return us back home to our most true and expansive selves. She is a Buddhist, a highly sensitive person and sober. She lives in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin. 

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Heidi Iverson

Mini Crystal/Jewelry Pouch

Heidi is a textile artist, minimum waste clothing designer, and natural dye advocate based in Northern California. She's been doing handwork since she was six years old, thanks to her grandmother, who could make anything out of almost nothing. Heidi's grandmother grew up during the Depression on a farm in a small town in Iowa. Because of those experiences, she taught Heidi that even the smallest piece of fabric had value. 

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Kasia Jacquot

Folk Embroidery for Your Home

Kasia offers a world of hand embroidery that becomes part of your home, your wardrobe and your life. Not just another craft hobby, Kasia's embroidery designs and kits come with encouragement and inspiration of what to turn your finished pieces into so you don't end up with piles of unfinished projects. Incorporating her Polish heritage and love of Polish folk craft into her designs, Kasia's designs are bold and colourful, yet simple to stitch as she is a big advocate of shedding the need for perfection. She has also created an online space where over 5000 like minded embroiderers share their "Kasia projects". And for those needing a bit of help to get started she also has a free online course.

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Kat Waters

Tambour Embroidery: an Introduction to Couture Beadwork

Kat has been sewing since her feet could reach the pedal, and now makes everything she wears. She learned Tambour Embroidery in 2017 to make her wedding dress and has loved it ever since. She loves to share skills and her goal is to provide inspiration for other intrepid sewists to dip their toes into a handmade world!

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Kate Sekules

Three Saucy Mends to Enhance Anything

Kate Sekules is a writer, historian, and educator who believes the world needs mending.  She is the author of "MEND! A Refashioning Manual and Manifesto" (Penguin, 2020), and is completing a doctorate at the Bard Graduate Center NYC with a dissertation titled "A History and Theory of Mending." She is a professor of fashion history at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, teaches the new course, "Mending Fashion" at Parsons, NYC, and has given workshops and lectures at RISD, Winterthur, and the British Museum, the Textile Arts Center, and Omega Institute, among many others. She dispenses mendication as the clothes physician Dr Mend, and, as  @visiblemend, hosts #MendMarch on Instagram. 

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Kate Ward

Make a Multi-Purpose Pouch!

Kate Ward is an Australian interdisciplinary artist, curator and educator with over twenty years experience working and teaching in the Arts. Her interests include ceramics, jewelry, printmaking, and intermedia, but her heart lies with textile arts, and she’s been stitching avidly for about ten years.

Kate’s been able to combine her love of art with her love of travel, studying and creating all over the world, including participating in an exchange at Kyoto Seika University - a dream for someone with Kate’s fascination and respect for Japanese culture and aesthetics.

Prompted by her passions for textiles, sustainability, and living meaningfully, Kate started focusing on Zen Stitching in 2020. By embracing the beautiful and practical designs of sashiko stitching, Kate is not only mending clothes, but also reducing textile waste and practicing mindfulness.

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Kiala Givehand

Fun & Functional Fabric Books

Kiala Givehand is a multi-passionate creative, published poet, bookbinder, printmaker, fountain pen collector, and road trip warrior who finds inspiration in astrology, sacred geometry, mandalas, other ancient intuitive guidance systems, and storytelling. She believes in surrounding herself with ordinary humans who live extraordinary lives and gathering with people who make her laugh and love uncontrollably. She lives a life intent on cultivating happiness and, along with her husband Damon, is the co-creator of the Sacred Makers Soul Retreat @ Squam Lake. Kiala guides women from all over the world through creative & spiritual awakenings and teaches them to find what makes them happy and pursue it without regrets. She is on a mission to help people gather their ideas, images, and stories in order to understand themselves better and deepen their relationship with the Divine.

Kiala is the creator of the Mixed Media Inspiration Deck™, the visionary behind Pull Pen Paint™, the hands that created The Book-in-a-Day YouTube series, a SoulCollage® Facilitator & Trainer, a Cave Canem Fellow, a Voices of Our Nations (VONA) alum, and a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. Follow her shenanigans on Instagram -- @kialagives.

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Kirsty Freeman

Contemporary Bee Embroidery Project

Kirsty is a modern embroidery kit & cross stitch kit designer based in rural Leicestershire, UK. Her kits are focused on animals and florals, using lots of colour, texture and pattern to share her love of embroidery! She designs kits suitable for both beginners and more advanced stitchers, and just wants people to fall in love with embroidery the same way she has. Embroidery really helps Kirsty to look after her mental health, and she loves that she gets to share this journey with people all around the world – helping them to relax and be creative too.

Kirsty trained at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, focusing on hand and digital embroidery; she worked as a designer for the high street, before founding Kirsty Freeman Design in 2019.

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Lucinda Walker

Jogakbo: Korean "Stained-Glass" Patchwork

Lucinda Walker is a multidisciplinary artist from the United States living in Lyon, France. 

She began making patchwork quilts in 2014, introducing her to a warm community of makers and opening doors to the broader international world of handmade textiles. She creates quilts, curtains, and artworks using meditative processes and mindful improvisation, favoring idiosyncratic anomalies over perfectionism. Her quilts have been exhibited internationally and have achieved recognition through publications and awards. 

Lucinda teaches art, sewing, and quilting workshops emphasizing sustainability and intuitive creativity. She plans to direct her future work toward art therapy and helping others access creative play and self-expression.

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Melissa Galbraith | MCreativeJ

Upcycle Your Clothing with Embroidered Flower Pockets

Melissa Galbraith is the fiber artist behind MCreativeJ. She was born and raised in the desert of Washington state where her mother instilled a love of making things by hand at an early age. Melissa shares her love of nature through whimsical and modern hand embroidery kits, patterns, workshops, and her book, How to Embroider Texture and Pattern.

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Mollie Johanson

Meditative Mums and Marigolds - Adding Embroidery to a Stretched Canvas

Mollie Johanson has loved creating and crafting cute things for as long as she can remember. Embroidery is her first love, but she also enjoys designing and stitching felt and cross stitch projects, and her work is known for including sweet smiling faces in unexpected places. She is the author of Stitch Love: Sweet Creatures Big & Small and the Cross Stitch Celebrations series. Mollie lives near Chicago, where she is often seen stitching and sipping coffee. 

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Rebecca Desnos

Making Ink from Acorns

Rebecca Desnos is a natural dye artist, author and educator based in the UK. For the last decade, she’s been exploring the colourful world of natural dyes with a particular focus on wild, foraged and homegrown plants.

She does all of her creative work whilst juggling life as a mother of three, and quite literally writes books during nap times. Since 2016, Rebecca has self-published 10 books and magazines.

Starting plant dyeing over a decade ago was a pivotal moment in her life as she finally felt creatively satisfied. Rebecca spent many years searching for her passion in life and discovered that natural dyeing was it. It turned out that this craft unites lots of interests: a love of colour, a passion for hand crafts, the desire to get to know her local surroundings, and also an interest in creating non toxic/healthy fabric and clothing.

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Ruth Woods

Create a Practice Project Wall using Plant Fibre

Ruth Woods, based in Australia, is a dedicated and experienced professional in the arts and crafts sector, having devoted over 30 years to teaching in this field. She founded Craft School Oz a decade ago, delivering  workshops for individuals to learn and explore their creativity. Recently, Ruth has expanded her offerings through an online school, offering a variety of workshops focused on basketry and slow stitching. Her latest achievement includes the publication of a best selling book titled "Finding Form with Fibre," which highlights the work of talented artists and explores different basketry techniques. Ruth's has a genuine passion for her art and commitment to sharing her knowledge to inspire others. 

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Rebekah Johnston

Make a Slow Stitched Coaster from Scrap Fabrics

Rebekah Johnston is a textile artist and educator from Nottingham, UK. Her art intertwines artistic self-discovery, sustainability, and the meditative practice of hand stitching. Embracing the unhurried rhythm of her craft, she finds solace and introspection in the deliberate act of slow stitching, allowing her thoughts to settle and reflect.

Her inspiration stems from discarded scraps and garment offcuts, which she transforms into quilts and wall hangings. With meticulous attention, she pieces together unconventional shapes, balancing positive and negative space to create harmonious compositions. Each shape is thoughtfully placed, resulting in a new visual arrangement that tells hidden narratives.

Through her workshops, Rebekah extends an invitation for others to experience the same meditative calm and self-reflection. She encourages participants to embrace slowness, appreciate the beauty in discarded materials, and foster a mindful connection between their hands, mind, and creative spirit.

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