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Browse our wide variety of categories in this craft blog to learn more about knitting, quilting and a variety of techniques you will encounter on our beginner craft courses and accredited distance learning courses.
Sarah Crowe hadn’t studied formally since finishing her MA back in 2007. Ten years into a career teaching in secondary schools, she found herself longing for a way back into her own creative practice, and it was patchwork and quilting that gave her exactly the route she needed. At first,
Jan Beaney’s machine embroidery begins long before a needle touches fabric. It starts in a sketchbook, with a scribble she would never show anyone else, built from a habit she calls simply looking, looking, looking. Beaney joined the 62 Group in 1963, within months of its founding, and is now
It took a glassworker’s eye to see the possibilities in wool. Wendy Sellers had spent years shaping glass when a felt artist moved into a studio nearby, and one workshop was all it took. “That was it,” she says, “I had the bug.” What began with a single afternoon of
Originally published 2018, updated July 2026 I’m often asked how exactly SST’s enrolment process works, and it’s a fair question, because there’s more going on behind the scenes than most people expect. So I thought it was time to explain it properly, from the moment enrolment opens to the moment
There is a particular kind of textile artistry that most of us never think to look for, and it is hiding in plain sight on our television screens. Daniel Byrne, founder and creative director of Puppets Magic Studio, has spent his career proving that hand stitching, fabric selection and careful
Victoria Merness’s photographic embroidery began with an ultimatum, not a plan. Partway through her master’s degree at the University of Salford, a tutor told her to choose, paint or stitch, never both on the same piece. She chose stitch, and has not looked back since. By the time that decision
A Chance Find and a Long-Awaited Return to Hand Embroidery There are discoveries you make in charity shops that change things. For Elaine Fraser, it was a partly finished embroidered linen tea tray cloth, its original threads still neatly bundled alongside it, waiting for hands confident enough to continue the
What does it mean to use a sewing machine as a paintbrush? For Murron Fraser, a contemporary textile artist whose practice weaves together machine embroidery, printmaking, and hand-applied processes, the answer lies somewhere between nature, folklore, and the kind of uninhibited creative play that most adults forget they are allowed.
Some people come to knitting late. Rhona Arthur came to it through memory: the click of her mother’s needles, the grannies who could turn a heel without so much as glancing at a pattern. She grew up surrounded by the craft, taught herself as a student, and spent decades producing
From the jewel-bright geometry of a seedhead to the papery translucence of a poppy petal, plants have long inspired textiles and have been a common theme through the history of embroidery. What distinguishes the artists gathered here is not simply that they look at the natural world, but the rigour
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