No amount of superlatives would suffice to describe Georgina Bellamy’s work. Her fanciful menageries stitched in gold will take your breath away. Reindeer, frogs, pandas and more come to life with intricate goldwork and exquisite detail.

Georgina is on a mission to bring the age-old tradition of goldwork embroidery back to life, but she’s also turning that tradition a bit on its head. Her 3-dimensional sculptures surprise and trick the eye. And her embroidery-embellished apparel is equally stunning.

We’re so pleased to offer a behind-the-scenes look into Georgina’s process, as well as her philosophy and effort to use her talents to build community. It’s a remarkable story.

Georgina graduated from the London College of Fashion with a BA in surface textiles. She has created embroidery for various fashion designers, artists and students, which led to her founding her own brand called ‘That Embroidery Girl.’ Her work has been featured on TV, in magazines, and her ‘In My Garden’ exhibition is featured in the current UK ‘Knitting and Stitching Show.’ Georgina also offers classes in southeast London to help preserve the goldwork craft and provide access to the tradition to lower-income students.

Deborah Boschert’s ‘About’ section on her website is as whimsical and creative as her art quilts. You’ll not only learn about her artistic achievements, but you’ll also discover she doesn’t like mac and cheese and usually doesn’t cut paper with fabric scissors.

Deborah first and foremost reports she is a self-taught artist who is known especially for her use of personal symbols. And her fans will tell you she’s also a master at using colour and composition.

We had the pleasure of interviewing Deborah to learn more about her creative process, as well as her road to artistic success. And we think you’ll find her answers both refreshing and inspiring. Especially if you, too, are largely self-taught.

Deborah’s award-winning quilts have been featured in countless quilt show exhibitions and art museums since 2003.

Janet Bolton creates her tranquil and harmonious textile art pictures using the simplest of hand sewing techniques; collage, appliqué and straight stitch.

Her inspiration comes from visual experiences, memories and imagination. Sometimes a fabric’s texture or history inspires a composition. For Janet, the placement of each element within the composition is important to her work, in order to evoke a particular feeling. She favours an uncluttered approach with good use of space, to highlight the collaged areas, their colour and composition.

Janet trained in Fine Arts before moving into textile art, following her lifelong passion for working with fabric. She has been on the Crafts Council Selected Index of Makers since 1985 and her work is held in both public and private collections. Janet has become a master of interlacing her home and work commitments to suit her desired lifestyle, working from her home studio and taking the time to enjoy the process of creation.

In this interview, Janet shares how her career developed and gives her advice for aspiring textile artists. She also describes the process of creating her very personal artworks, driven by memories and experiences.

Merill Comeau creates installations, murals and garments. She uses the concept of disruption and reordering to build stories exploring memory, repair, regeneration and women’s experiences. Merill makes comment on societal expectations for sexual and emotional expression in her work. Her pieced fabric compositions explore historical and contemporary women’s roles such as the toil of the maker, the privilege of the wearer, the job of mothering and how to be a ‘good’ daughter.

Merill has shown her art in over seventy exhibitions including at the Danforth Museum of Art, the Fuller Museum of Craft and the Fitchburg Museum of Art. She has facilitated over thirty collaborative community art projects and has received grant support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Covenant Foundation.

Merill has received residencies three times at the Weir Farm National Historic Site in Connecticut. She has also completed residencies at Hambidge Center for Art and Science in Georgia, Acadia National Park in Maine, Catoctin Mountain Park in Maryland and the Vermont Studio Center. In addition, she lectures about fibre art in a post-modern context, creates work in healing groups and social justice communities and provides demonstrations of her techniques.

In this interview, read about how Merill drew upon memories of her childhood and her mother’s influence to create an installation titled ‘Family of Origin’, which explores universal themes including trying to make sense of our lives and the influence of our family. In this work, she stitched together snippets of fabric to represent the re-ordering and retelling of childhood narratives and the mending of wounds.

Integrating a passion for colour and textiles is what drives Barbara Shaw. She specialises in the construction of complex and colourful collages using stitched together fabric scraps, each chosen deliberately and carefully to achieve a specific look.

Barbara uses each fabric piece to add texture and pattern to her images. She brings her artwork alive with textile scraps in vibrant and subtle colours, adding fabrics with sparkle for light, chiffon ribbons for shading, lace for intricate detail and tweed for texture.

Over the years her work has become more impressionistic and she has challenged herself with more complicated subject matter, like her charming animated street scenes and characterful animals.

Her achievements include her selection as Artist in Residence at Chastleton House (National Trust) Oxfordshire (2014) and in Claydon House (National Trust) Buckinghamshire (2015). In 2014 she won a prize for Best Work as a Member of the Oxfordshire Craft Guild and her picture of a 17th Century chair was subsequently bought for the Oxfordshire County Museum Collections. In 2016, her picture ‘The Fabric of Life’ was displayed in an exhibition in the UK Parliament, ‘Tomorrow’s Child’, and her work on an Arctic theme was exhibited in Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History.