Offers vital information on choosing fabrics and creating patterns through basic sewing techniques. After learning how to make various styles of fabric books, readers will learn embellishment techniques that include painting, writing, decorative stitching, machine and hand embroidery, print and transfer techniques.

The possibilities for three-dimensional manipulation of fabric - gathering, pleating, tucking, shirring, and quilting woven materials - are seemingly endless. To describe them all would be to describe the entire history of sewing. In The Art of manipulating Fabric, Colette Wolff has set herself just this task, and she succeeds brilliantly. Working from the simplest possible form - a flat piece of cloth and a threaded needle - she categorizes all major dimensional techniques, show how they are related, and give examples of variations both traditional and modern. The result is an encyclopedia of techniques that resurface, reshape, restructure and reconstruct fabric. • More than 350 diagrams support the extensive how-tos, organized into broad general categories, then specific sub-techniques • Handsome photos galleries showcase the breathtaking possibilities in each technique and aid visual understanding by emphasizing the sculptured fabric surface with light and shadow • Textile artists and quilters, as well as garment and home decor sewers, will expand their design horizons with the almost limitless effects that can be achieved.

Ann Smalls imaginative use of cutting and manipulating techniques, and her layering and colouring tricks, makes this your go-to guide for bringing form and texture to your fabric artwork. This book is a rich resource and reference for textile artists seeking new ideas and who want to experiment with reverse appliqué and related techniques such as layering, trapunto, stacks, puffs and fabric manipulation. • Packed with techniques suitable for quilting and other textile art • Three wearable step-by-step projects • Clear, close-up images make layering enjoyable and accessible.

Combine your love of crafting, fabric, and reading to create unique volumes for preserving your memories. The 24 projects feature a variety of binding methods as well as inventive techniques like transferring photos onto textiles.

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.

A magnificent work of original research that unravels history through textiles and cloth—how we make it, use it, and what it means to us. How is a handmade fabric helping save an ancient forest? Why is a famous fabric pattern from India best known by the name of a Scottish town? How is a Chinese dragon robe a diagram of the whole universe? What is the difference between how the Greek Fates and the Viking Norns used threads to tell our destiny? In Fabric, bestselling author Victoria Finlay spins us round the globe, weaving stories of our relationship with cloth and asking how and why people through the ages have made it, worn it, invented it, and made symbols out of it. And sometimes why they have fought for it. She beats the inner bark of trees into cloth in Papua New Guinea, fails to handspin cotton in Guatemala, visits tweed weavers at their homes in Harris, and has lessons in patchwork-making in Gee's Bend, Alabama - where in the 1930s, deprived of almost everything they owned, a community of women turned quilting into an art form. She began her research just after the deaths of both her parents —and entwined in the threads she found her personal story too. Fabric is not just a material history of our world, but Finlay's own journey through grief and recovery.