The Textile Artist S Studio Handbook

Explore the world of textile arts, one thread at a time! The Textile Artist’s Studio Handbook is the only book you need for expanding your repertoire of textile crafting and design techniques. This is the go-to guide for the foundations of design and fabrication, glossary of materials, and classic techniques that include weaving, dyeing, painting, and more! Plus, where else can you get behind-the-scenes access to setting up the best home textile studio for you? Inside, you’ll find exploration of basic materials (including fibers, dyes, paints, and other media); visual tutorials for spinning, felting, crochet, weaving, sewing, and quilting; primers for surface decoration techniques such as dyeing, painting, stitching, and screen printing; and patterns and project instructions.

Explore the world of textile arts, one thread at a time. Expand your repertoire of textile crafting and design techniques. Shows the foundations of design and fabrication, includes a glossary of materials, and classic techniques that include weaving, dyeing, painting, and more.

Beginning with studio practices and safety rules, this information-packed handbook is appropriate for both newcomers and experienced dyers but assumes that readers have a serious interest in textile design. An overview of dyeing starts with fibers and fabrics and discusses all aspects of the dyes favored by textile studios--fiber reactive, acid, vat, and disperse--before explaining discharging, screen printing, monoprinting, stamping, stenciling, resist dyeing, devore, and painting. Would-be fabric artists are advised along the way to identify a personal approach to dyeing--free spirit? rule-follower?--and color photographs of work by today's top fiber artists elucidate prevailing styles. Recipes and techniques are accompanied by step-by-step instructions with photographs, and a concealed spiral binding allows the book to lie flat. Ten appendices include a worksheet for recording chemicals, procedures, and costs for all projects; a guide to washing fabric; descriptions of stock solutions, thickeners, and steaming; a metric conversion table; and a guide to water temperatures.

In recent years, the study of textiles and culture has become a dynamic field of scholarship, reflecting new global, material and technological possibilities. This is the first handbook of specially commissioned essays to provide a guide to the major strands of critical work around textiles past and present and to draw upon the work of artists and designers as well as researchers in textiles studies. The handbook offers an authoritative and wide-ranging guide to the topics, issues, and questions that are central to the study of textiles today: it examines how material practices reflect cross-cultural influences; it explores textiles' relationships to history, memory, place, and social and technological change; and considers their influence on fashion and design, sustainable production, craft, architecture, curation and contemporary textile art practice. This illustrated volume will be essential reading for students and scholars involved in research on textiles and related subjects such as dress, costume and fashion, feminism and gender, art and design, and cultural history. Cover image: Anne Wilson, To Cross (Walking New York), 2014. Site-specific performance and sculpture at The Drawing Center, NYC. Thread cross research. Photo: Christie Carlson/Anne Wilson Studio.

The Glass Artist's Studio Handbook offers readers a comprehensive and accessible guide to not only the nuts and bolts of this perennially popular craft but insight into the artisan crafter's lifestyle.

An inspirational guide to using nature in textile art, with step-by-step projects Plants, flowers, gardens, insects and birds are a rich source of inspiration for artists and designers of all kinds. This beautiful guide demonstrates how to get the most out of your surroundings to create original and unique pieces in textiles. Beginning with a chapter on drawing from nature, the book demonstrates how to use sketchbooks and create mood boards to explore your local environment and landscape. The author demonstrates how to make small pieces such as folding books based on observational drawing and stitch. Moving on to a section on floral inspiration, the author shows how to use plants and flowers in your work, from using stencilled flower motifs as embellishment to printing with plants onto fabric and making simple relief prints. Finally, the taking flight chapter demonstrates how to move into three-dimensions and sculptural work with birds and insects made from cloth. Featuring step-by-step projects as well as work from contemporary artists, makers and collaborative groups throughout, this practical and beautiful guide shows how practitioners of all kinds can draw from the natural world for making and inspiration.

When Jane Dunnewold's book Complex Cloth was published in 1996, it quickly became the bible of surface design for fiber artists. In the years since, the world of surface design has significantly expanded: now fiber artists, art-to-wear designers, and art quilters have a much broader range of surface design products to choose from, and there are a wealth of technique combinations that can be used to create art cloth. Art Cloth picks up where Complex Cloth left off, showing how to layer processes with the latest products to create stunning cloth for use in a variety of fiber art. Following Jane's techniques with step-by-step photography, you will learn to create art cloth using dyes, color removing agents, paints, and foils combined through processes that include silk-screen printing, stamping, stenciling, and handpainting. In addition to detailed step-by-step wet-media surface design techniques, Jane demonstrates how the use of color and design contribute to successful layering. She guides and inspires artists to take their art cloth to the next level through sidebars with design tips and exercises that support the technical information. Finally, each technique chapter concludes with project ideas for the skills learned, so anyone working through the book can literally build layers on cloth as each chapter is completed.