Puerto Rican textile designer Paola Melendez makes work with comfort in mind; her brand, titled Paola Melendez Casa, specialises in the most sumptuous fabrics made with craftsmanship and quality at their core. Working with hand-designed motifs, hand-crafted Belgian linen and screen-printed designs, her works are built to last, and she hopes, will become family heirlooms…
Finding Sanctuary: Paola Melendez’s Comforting Textiles
There is a familiar quality of warmth and intimacy bound into each thread of Puerto Rican artist Richie Wilde Lopez’s tactile textile art, which he produces in homage to his family heritage, and the women who passed traditions of weaving, embroidering, dyeing and creating down to him. He believes memories are stored deep within fabrics,…
Renowned St Ives artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham made work with astonishing subtlety, conveying the nuanced patina of rugged landscapes in an array of delicately shifting hues throughout her long and prolific career. Soft, subtle shades of bronzed brown like that of Shiitake Linen weaved through many of her most accomplished works of art, capturing the warm,…
Thinking back to my high school textiles days, I remember having to test stitch settings on every fabric we planned to use for our projects. We would cut out little squares of fabric and experiment with different stitch lengths and widths, and edge-finishing techniques. At the time, it felt unnecessary, not to mention tedious….
Fiber artist Katrina Sanchez makes deeply tactile and brilliantly bright knitted objects that speak of her sunny childhood in Panama, bringing a joyful and optimistic sensibility to the spaces they inhabit. The innocence of her soft, puffy creations makes them immediately appealing on a surface level, but they also form a potent means of fantasy,…
Could you tell us a bit about yourself and how you got into sewing? I feel like it’s almost impossible to think of a time when I wasn’t doing some form of sewing or crafting. One of my earliest memories is riffling through my grandmother’s wicker sewing basket with the shell covered lid and believing…
The early 20th century Norwegian Expressionist painter Edvard Munch saw art as a tool for expressing his innermost thoughts, feelings and desires, and the colours he worked with were a vital tool for expressing these intimate moments from his life. Deep shades of brown like Coffee Bean often played a key role, forming dark tree…
Contemporary textile artist Camila Barvo weaves complex ideas into her soft sculpture and fibre art, invoking curious, surreal worlds that veer somewhere between dreams and nightmares. Long fibres are stretched out, teased and pulled into colossal twisted braids and knots, hung suspended from the ceiling, spilling onto the floor, or draped across outdoor surfaces. She…
I love a notch, so much so that I’ve decided to dedicate this article to these small but important markings. Here, I’ll explain why they’re so helpful, when to use them, and how to add them to your own patterns or adapt them for existing ones. What exactly are notches? Notches are small markings found…
Interior views were one of Henri Matisse’s most enduring subjects throughout his career, a theme which allowed him to indulge in his great passion for decorative patterns, surfaces, textures, and colours. Tea Rose’s hot pink was one of the shades he returned to again and again, colouring anything from heavy curtains to lush carpets and…
I’m what you would call a classic perfectionist. I’m detail-oriented and I can set ridiculously high standards for myself. I often obsess over the tiniest of details and naturally notice even the smallest of mistakes. Because of this, I can interpret mistakes as signs of imperfection or even failure. I can also have a pretty…
A legendary Latin American folk musician, researcher, poet, and performer, Chilean artist Violeta Parra (1917-1967) was also a remarkable artist, producing a large body of intricate quilts and embroideries, or ‘arperillas’, traditional Chilean patchwork pictures made from wool, thread, and repurposed textile fragments. She famously displayed these embroideries at the Louvre in Paris in 1964,…
Dusty Rose Linen’s muted, pink hue was an enduring feature in Pierre Bonnard’s shimmering, intimiste paintings, conveying sunlight spreading across morning terraces, breezing through curtains, or flooding across tabletops through open windows. He had an uncanny ability to breathe wonder into life’s most ordinary moments – from intimate bathing scenes to eating breakfast in the…
Iron-on or sew-in, woven or non-woven, lightweight or heavyweight. With so many different types, weaves, and weights to choose from, how do you know which interfacing is best for your project? In this article, I will explain the two main types of interfacing before diving into the differences in weave and weight. Hopefully by the…
There is a spirited and playful quality to the textile and wallpaper designs of Dutch maker Ottoline de Vries, who established her eponymous company, simply called ‘Ottoline’, in 2011; since then her work has become an international success, gracing magazine spreads and interiors throughout the world. Ottoline, now based in London, is widely recognised for…
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