Textile Creativity Through Nature

New ideas for working with nature to nurture creativity in felted and embroidered textile art. Immerse yourself in nature and rewild your creative practice with inspiration from textile artist Jeanette Appleton. With a focus on the versatile medium of felt, she takes readers through a series of ideas for working with nature to boost creativity, inspire, and make us more sustainable as artists. The book covers: • How to capture the nuances of nature through creating exciting felt surfaces - lines of sea, frosted puddles, hedge and grass - and how to translate them into subtleties of texture and stitch. • Transforming recycled cloth by bonding memories, mixed-media and found objects into your work. • Cutting and repairing techniques: making cuts and slits in the layers of fabric to reveal the secret strata of nature beneath, echoing the planet's fragility. • How to make the best use of sketchbooks, maps and mapping to record inspiration from time spent in nature. • A variety of strategies for overcoming artist's block, from revisiting past diaries and sketchbooks to interacting differently with your local environment. Throughout, the author constantly challenges the felt process, discovering a new creative working practice through connecting with the outside world. Richly illustrated with exciting examples of the author's beautiful and reflective work, this inspirational and practical guide will appeal to textile and felt artists of all levels.

Jeanette Appleton is an internationally recognized textile artist who works predominantly in fibre and fabric by hand felting or industrial processes. She was a member of the prestigious 62 Group, exhibiting widely in the UK (including solo touring exhibition Sow:Sew). She has p articipated in international exchanges and group exhibitions in the USA, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Japan and Georgia. Her work has been featured in various magazines and books, with many examples of her work in private and public collections in the UK and overseas. She lives in Devon.