Remembering those we’ve lost, and empowering those of the future Stitching Stolen Lives is an in-depth look at the mission and work of the Social Justice Sewing Academy Remembrance Project. Together, we remember the lives lost due to racial injustices, with an in-depth sharing of their story. The SJSA compiled extraordinary portrait art quilts that memorialize the individuals and say their names, over and over. SJSA also works with young adults and teens to help find their voice through the art of fabric and quilting, shown through student gallery photography. By working with SJSA, students learn how to cut fabric and make quilt blocks, and along the way, find the strength to express the systemic problems that plague their everyday life through their artwork. This book shares stories and insight into the lives lost and the long overlooked, heartrending truths shared by teens and young adults. Personal stories of individuals and their families whose lives have been cut short by racially motivated crime Includes thought-provoking portrait art quilt blocks in the likeness of those whose lives were stolen Valuable resource section provides information on how to talk about racial equity, use art as a tool to aid self-expression, and get started on your own social justice initiative

Stitching Stolen Lives is an in-depth look at the mission and work of the Social Justice Sewing Academy Remembrance Project. This book shares stories and insight into the lives lost and the long overlooked, heartrending truths shared by teens and young adults.

Learn the art of thread painting from Instagram sensation Michelle Staub Cats and dogs seem to always have a paw planted firmly in our hearts. Capture the life in their eyes and the texture of their fur with a unique embroidered pet portrait! Insta-famous artist Michelle Staub puts a modern spin on thread painting with her easy-to-learn approach. Get started with 4 basic embroidery stitches, and follow the detailed tutorials to hone your skills. Capture awe-inspiring details of your pet with lessons in full-color thread painting or go clean with a simple line drawing—the choice is yours. Learn to personalize your art piece with names, dates, and decorative accents. With 20 sample patterns to customize, you can easily recreate any breed! Paint stunningly realistic pet portraits with just a needle and thread Try your hand at two styles—minimal outlines and incredible full-color renderings Make it modern with floral garlands, personalized banners, and crisp lettering Start today with 4 easy stitches and 20 customizable projects

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A powerful, poetic memoir about what it means to exist as an Indigenous woman in America, told in snapshots of the author’s encounters with gun violence. Finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize • Goop Book Club Pick • “Essential . . . We need more voices like Toni Jensen’s, more books like Carry.”—Tommy Orange, New York Times bestselling author of There There Toni Jensen grew up around guns: As a girl, she learned to shoot birds in rural Iowa with her father, a card-carrying member of the NRA. As an adult, she’s had guns waved in her face near Standing Rock, and felt their silent threat on the concealed-carry campus where she teaches. And she has always known that in this she is not alone. As a Métis woman, she is no stranger to the violence enacted on the bodies of Indigenous women, on Indigenous land, and the ways it is hidden, ignored, forgotten. In Carry, Jensen maps her personal experience onto the historical, exploring how history is lived in the body and redefining the language we use to speak about violence in America. In the title chapter, Jensen connects the trauma of school shootings with her own experiences of racism and sexual assault on college campuses. “The Worry Line” explores the gun and gang violence in her neighborhood the year her daughter was born. “At the Workshop” focuses on her graduate school years, during which a workshop classmate repeatedly killed off thinly veiled versions of her in his stories. In “Women in the Fracklands,” Jensen takes the reader inside Standing Rock during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests and bears witness to the peril faced by women in regions overcome by the fracking boom. In prose at once forensic and deeply emotional, Toni Jensen shows herself to be a brave new voice and a fearless witness to her own difficult history—as well as to the violent cultural landscape in which she finds her coordinates. With each chapter, Carry reminds us that surviving in one’s country is not the same as surviving one’s country.

If You Can Cut, You Can Collage is specially designed for people who feel like they can't make art. Want to know a secret? You can You just need a little inspiration, instruction, and confidence. Collage is a wonderful creative outlet, particularly for people who want to make art, but don't feel they have the skills or confidence for other endeavors. You can still explore and experiment with color, composition, and various themes and end up with exciting and often unexpected results. If you Can Cut, You Can Collage takes some of the mystery out of collage through easy illustrated pages that show you the basic techniques of collecting and cutting imagery, composing and adhering compositions, and then provides a wealth of exercises that get readers going on their own creative projects. We'll get you started with simple, focused, projects like making a collage with only circles, where you'll learn important concepts like how to create a focal point, how to use repetition successfully, how to achieve contrast, balance, symmetry, and more. You'll be incorporating vintage ephemera, typography and lettering, and even urban and found materials in no time

Jennifer Chiaverini’s bestselling Elm Creek Quilts series began with The Quilter’s Apprentice and continues with Round Robin—the name for a quilt stitched by many hands in turn—a poignant story of friendship and loyalty. The Elm Creek Quilters have begun a Round Robin quilt, created by sewing concentric patchwork borders to a central block, as a gift for their beloved fellow quilter Sylvia Compson. But even as the quilt is passed from friend to friend, its eloquent beauty increasing with every stitch, the threads of their happiness begin to unravel. As each woman confronts a personal crisis, a painful truth, or a life-changing choice, the quilt serves as a symbol of the complex and enduring bonds between mothers and daughters, sisters and friends.

Engaging with the work of M. Jacqui Alexander and Black feminist thought more generally, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's M Archive is a series of prose poems that speculatively documents the survival of Black people following a worldwide cataclysm while examining the possibilities of being that exceed the human.