A guide to creating beautiful and meaningful textiles. Poetic cloth is about how cloth, stitch and surface create personal meaning in textile art. It shows how a more thoughtful use of material and process can create textiles of depth and meaning. Grounded in the key elements of the well-established author's work, the book begins with an introduction to materials, their properties and personal meanings. Subsequent chapters help the reader to explore the connection between process and material, focusing on stitch, print, surface manipulation and construction to create seductive textile surfaces. The emphasis throughout is on a sensitivity to material, a quiet attention to detail and thoughtful application of textile technique. The chapters are: Touch (cloth and swatch); Stitch (mark, surface and space); Trace (layer and shadow play); Fragment (worn, threadbare, cobweb); Mend (patch, seam, and darn); Lustre (alchemy and radiance). Techniques include hand stitch, shadow work, patching, darning, devoré and cyanotype printing. Written by member of the prestigious 62 Group Hannah Lamb, this is an invaluable book for textile artists who want to give more meaning to their work.

Award-winning creators, Amy Novesky and Isabelle Arsenault, present a picture book biography of a beloved artist in Cloth Lullaby: The Woven Life of Louise Bourgeois. Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) was a world-renowned modern artist noted for her sculptures made of wood, steel, stone, and cast rubber. Her most famous spider sculpture, Maman, stands more than 30 feet high. Just as spiders spin and repair their webs, Louise’s own mother was a weaver of tapestries. Louise spent her childhood in France as an apprentice to her mother before she became a tapestry artist herself. She worked with fabric throughout her career, and this biographical picture book shows how Bourgeois’s childhood experiences weaving with her loving, nurturing mother provided the inspiration for her most famous works. With a beautifully nuanced and poetic story, this book stunningly captures the relationship between mother and daughter and illuminates how memories are woven into us all. “With evocative, gorgeous illustrations and an inspirational story of an artist not often covered in children’s literature, this arresting volume is an excellent addition to nonfiction picture book collections, particularly those lacking titles about women artists.” —Booklist, starred review

What makes one poem better than another? Do Christians have an obligation to strive for excellence in the arts? While orthodox Christians are generally quick to affirm the existence of absolute truth and absolute goodness, even many within the church fall prey to the postmodern delusion that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." This book argues that Christian doctrine in fact gives us a solid basis on which to make aesthetic judgments about poetry in particular and about the arts more generally. The faith once and for all delivered unto the saints is remarkable in its combined emphasis on embodied particularity and meaningful transcendence. This unique combination makes it the perfect starting place for art that speaks to who we are as creatures made for eternity.

Winner: 2017 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards, Gold, Multicultural 2017 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards, Silver, Art & Photography Oaxaca Stories in Cloth includes more than 175 sensitive, intimate, full-color portraits of traditional people of the Oaxacan hinterlands who continue to wrap themselves in the clothing that expresses their ancient, living culture. Eric Mindling captures this vanishing world with artistry and respect, and just in the nick of time. This book offers a window into a vanishing culture where few people have the opportunity to go.