Textile Talk

Karen L. Miller, owner of Redbird Quilt Co., is Master Educator for Aurifil USA, an Aurifilosopher, author, and passionate advocate for free motion quilting.

Her quilting journey began in 2007 when her sister invited her to join a simple block of the month program. Karen quickly fell in love with hand appliqué and free motion machine quilting, sparking a passion that would shape her career.

As Karen's enthusiasm for learning and developing her quilting skills grew, she naturally gravitated towards Aurifil's 100% Egyptian cotton threads. The exceptional quality and impressive range of weights and colors captivated her, aligning perfectly with her creative vision.

In 2019, Karen's expertise and passion led her to join forces with Milan-based Aurifil, becoming their Master Educator and launching the innovative thread education program called "Aurifilosophy".

Her work with Aurifil thread focuses on educating quilters about how these high-quality threads can elevate projects from simply finished to artistically extraordinary, unlocking new creative possibilities.

Karen's versatility shines through her love for both hand and machine creations. She continually designs and experiments with all weights of Aurifil thread, generously sharing her knowledge and experience with the broader quilting community.

Her commitment to education and inspiration has made her a respected figure in the quilting world, known for her ability to instill confidence and creativity in quilters of all skill levels.

School of Stitched Textiles: View her work here https://www.sofst.org/textile-talk-with-karen-miller/

Aurifil Website: https://aurifil.com/

Aurifil USA Shopping: https://shopaurifil.com/

Aurifil Blog:https://auribuzz.com/

Aurifil Thread Education Program: https://www.aurifil.com/aurifilosophy

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Gail is a Canadian who resided for 20 years in Britain, until returning t the US in 1995. She moved to Britain in 1976 with her American husband and family. She studied art in Canada, England and Scotland. She completed both parts 1 and 2 (Diploma) of the City & Guilds Design and Embroidery course, achieving a distinction in both parts. She was awarded the Senior Award of Licentiateship (LCGI)by the City & Guilds Institute. Gail has previously taught City & Guilds Embroidery courses and was for many years, a City & Guilds External Verifier for various colleges in the UK. She has authored five books in Embroidery. Since moving to the US she has directed and taught at the Arts Centre she founded in Washington State - Gail Harker Center for Creative Arts. She has taught Certificate and Diploma Courses in Design and Embroidery to hundreds of students from all parts of North America. She says that living and working in the UK was the single most important contributor to her labour of love as a designer and embroiderer that continues to lead her on a lifelong journey of discovery!

Links

School of Stitched Textiles https://www.sofst.org/

Gail Harker Center for Creative Arts

Blog: https://gailcreativestudies.wordpress.com/

Center’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/gailcreativestudies

Website: https://gailcreativestudies.com

Lorraine has been creating with fiber since she was a young girl. As a child she would while away the hours sewing, crocheting, and working with crewelwork. She learned to sew garments at the side of her mother and paternal grandmother who were both gifted seamstress’. 

She is a self-taught artist. She began quilting in 1997 and immediately was intrigued with the design elements of the quilt. Thus, began her exploration of color, repetition, design, and texture. Soon Lorraine began to experiment with a more contemporary approach to textiles and developed her own artistic voice. Her creative roots are firmly embedded in the traditional needle arts and this is reflected in her current body of work. Inspired by her Faith, her travels and the natural world, she employs layers of both hand and machine stitches together with various surface design techniques. This unique approach allows her to successfully captures the depth, color, contrast, and texture of her subject matter. 

Since 1993 Lorraine had lived in the Ithaca area of the Finger Lakes Region in Central New York until 2019 when she relocated to The Villages, Florida. She recently retired from a career in nursing. She enjoys the support of her husband, their children, and grandchildren. 

Lorraine is an exhibiting textile artist and has won several awards for her fiber art.

She owns and operates The Tangled Thread, a longarm quilting business; gives presentations and teaches classes focused on mixed media and stitched art.

These days, she dedicates her energy to facilitating a group of twenty-five local artists, who meet twice a month to share and explore their common love for textile art. Lorraine also enjoys writing poetry and painting with acrylics and watercolor.

School of Stitched Textiles MP Programme https://www.sofst.org/courses/masters-courses/

Contact Information:

Lorraine Benjamin

web https://lorrainebenjamin.com/

email [email protected]

facebook https://www.facebook.com/Lorisue28

instagram https://www.instagram.com/lorisue28/

Lucy Martin from Hand and Lock grew up in the Peak District, where her love for stitching began as she helped her mother make wedding dresses from age three. Her talent led her to work with renowned brands like Alexander McQueen, Burberry, and Catherine Walker. A classically trained embroiderer with a first-class honours degree, Lucy joined Hand & Lock in 2022 as Head of Education. Since then, she has transformed the school into an internationally recognized centre for contemporary embroidery, building a supportive community for students of all levels.

Lucy’s role involves designing and implementing a dynamic educational program, organizing diverse classes with guest tutors, and collaborating with venues like The National Portrait Gallery and Kew Gardens for private courses. Her responsibilities also include hosting embroidery retreats worldwide, sharing her passion and dedication to preserving this craft.

Currently, Lucy is teaching the Hand & Lock Diploma in Contemporary Embroidery, a rigorous program combining traditional and modern techniques. Her goal is to guide students in mastering technical skills while encouraging them to find their artistic voices, fostering the evolution of contemporary embroidery. Lucy’s commitment ensures that each student’s learning experience is challenging and couture-focused, leaving a lasting impact on the craft’s future.

Links: 

@handandlocklondon 

https://www.handembroideryshop.com/  

@lucymartinembroidery https://lucymartinembroidery.com/

School of Stitched Textiles https://www.sofst.org/

Annegret is a German American fiber artist who divides her time between Chapel Hill, a university town, and Kill Devil Hills, a town on the North Atlantic coast. Born in Germany and now residing in North Carolina, she lived in Ghana, France, Great Britain, and Australia before moving to the United States in 2001. Together with travels to countries as varied as Italy and India, these different cultural frameworks have shaped both her life and her art. The shores of the Albemarle Sound, near Kill Devil Hills on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, have become the inspiration for her recent work which explores the fragile ecosystems of the seaboard, where the impacts of global warming, human expansion, and nature’s resilience create a beautiful albeit precarious environment. Both the colors of the seashore and the use of earth pigments shape her palette, and photography serves as visual inspiration.

Her journey as an artist started almost thirty years ago as a traditional, self-taught quilter. After taking numerous in-person and online workshops, she decided that it was necessary to acquire a more formal education. Between 2018 and 2020, she completed an advanced (Level 4) City and Guild accredited course with the School of Stitched Textiles, followed by its two-year Master Practitioner Course which emphasized design skills and artistic development. She is active in the Studio Art Quilts Associates – both in the European and Middle Eastern region and the one covering North Carolina and Virginia. Her work has been exhibited in Europe and the United States, and she has her first solo exhibition coming up in May.

School of Stitched Textiles https://www.sofst.org/

Annegret's website https:/www.afauser.com

Instagram @annegretfauser

Sophie is a British wildlife artist who has lived in Africa for 22 years. She now lives in Dorset, England. She is moving to Costa Rica in the new year, where a whole new array of wildlife inspirations await!

Sophie produces her artworks by combining a collage of appliquéd fabrics with free motion embroidery. The details of the animals are sewn over the top of the appliqué collage; there is no pen or paint used.

She uses a heavyweight cotton ground fabric which is painted or dyed with botanical printing.

For the appliqué, Sophie mostly uses cotton fabrics from Liberty of London and the Kaffe Fassett Collective (Philip Jacobs, Kaffe Fassett and Brandon Mably).  Her sewing threads are 100% cotton and made by Aurifil of Italy. Sophie produces work up to 1.5 meters long, and a single piece of art this size can contain 3000 meters of thread.

Sophie also teaches online and in person. Details of her online courses can be found on her website.

In person workshops are advertised via her instagram and Facebook pages. She has taught in South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, England and the USA.

Her next teaching tour with be in the U.K June/July 2025…..dates and venues to be finalised. 

http://www.sophiestanding.art/

https://www.instagram.com/sophiestandingart/

https://www.facebook.com/sophiestandingart/

https://www.sofst.org/

Althea’s Crome is an Indiana based fiber artist who has chosen a very niche art form to express her artistic ideas and challenge her own skills as a technician.

Crome is a micro-knitter and has been developing her techniques for over 20 years. Using very fine silk threads and needles that she makes herself from surgical stainless steel, she can achieve a gauge of 80 stitches per inch. With so many stitches to the inch, Crome has been able to achieve incredible details in a minute scale. Her tiny pieces of knitting are intended as stand alone, sculptural pieces of art which she often refers to as “sweaterscapes.” 

Some of her pieces tell autobiographical stories, others are romantic pastoral scenes and many are inspired by the art and artists she admires. Crome’s work has been featured around the world in shows, galleries, museums books and even on the silver screen in the movie Coraline.

www.altheacrome.com

www.sofst.org

UK based textile artist Anne Kelly is an award-winning artist, author and tutor. Her multi-layered and densely stitched textiles have been described as ‘small worlds’. Trained in Canada and at Goldsmiths College in London, she creates wall hangings and objects using a mixture of mixed media collage and hand and machine embroidery. Her inspirations are taken from travel, memory, nature and especially folk art.

Anne tutors and teaches fine art and textiles to a variety of groups in the UK and abroad. and is a member of the Embroiderers Guild UK, the Crafts Council Directory and the Society for Embroidered Work. She also exhibits and curates group exhibitions nationally and internationally. Her four books for Batsford are widely collected and studied by students of all ages around the world.

Anne's website https://annekellytextiles.com/

School of Stitched Textiles https://www.sofst.org/

Holly Guertin is a contemporary fiber artist and textile designer in the Philadelphia, PA area. In her work, she explores the interconnectedness of the human person and invites her viewers to look at sheep and their wool as if in a mirror. In an increasingly disconnected, disembodied, and virtual world, her process-intense work grounds the viewer to the tactile and the real, showing the human experience as a marvel and a wonder. Holly graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) with a BFA in Fibers in 2011 and has been working in textiles and fiber arts ever since. Aside from her fiber artwork, she also creates textile designs for fashion brands. Her artwork has been featured in publications like Colossal, Business of Home, Frankie Magazine, and Knit Wit Magazine, among others. Her artwork has been displayed through SCAD’s Permanent Collection in Atlanta, Savannah, Hong Kong, and France. In 2019, she collaborated with Anthropologie for two collections, Fall and Holiday, inspired by her artworks. As a mother to four young sons, she explores themes of connection, passage of time, dignity of labor and the human body, and feminine tradition in textiles.

Holly on Instagram @hollyguertinart

Holly on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hollyguertinart/

Holly's website http://hollyguertin.com/

School of Stitched Textiles https://www.sofst.org/

Alison is a self-taught artist who works primarily with textiles, often incorporating mixed media elements into her work to enhance their compositions. She began her journey into textile art in her mid-forties, and since then, her work has continually evolved as she experiments with new techniques and ideas. Her work is a celebration of the natural world, captured through this tactile and versatile medium.

Drawing inspiration from the ever-changing seascapes and landscapes around her, Alison seeks to capture the beauty and tranquillity of nature in each piece she creates. She skilfully combines new and reclaimed fabrics, using meticulous layering and stitching to create two distinct styles: one that is richly textured and abstract, and the other that embodies a representational, painterly quality.

Her work has been featured in notable exhibitions, including the ING Discerning Eye exhibition and the Royal Society of Marine Artists’ exhibition. She also took part in series 9 of Sky Arts Landscape Artist of the Year. She is a member of the Society for Embroidered Work, the Visual Artists Association and the Devon Artists Network.

She has now written her first book entitles ‘Textile Seascapes’ which is published by Crowood Press. It takes readers through the essential skills and techniques needed to create stunning textile seascapes. This comprehensive resource equips both beginners and seasoned artists with the knowledge to craft beautiful textile pieces.

Alison's site https://alisonwhateleydesign.co.uk/

School of Stitched Textiles https://www.sofst.org/

Amazon link to Alison's book https://amzn.to/3Up7cHU