Stitching Freedom: Embroidery & Incarceration

Stitching Freedom: Embroidery & Incarceration

For centuries, people have stitched in good times and in bad, finding strength in the needle moving in and out of fabric. Stitching Freedom explores the embroidery made in prisons and mental health hospitals — those who have embroidered to distract, to reflect or to calm. From Mary, Queen of Scots to Lorina Bulwer, embroidery historian and curator Isabella Rosner unpicks twelve embroidered histories to discover what can be created when freedom is out of reach.

About the Author

Isabella Rosner is Curator of the Royal School of Needlework, Research Associate at Witney Antiques and host of the Sew What? podcast. An art historian who studies material culture from the seventeenth through nineteenth century, she specialises in the study of early modern women’s needlework, especially British examples, and schoolgirl samplers across all time periods. Isabella completed her PhD at King’s College London, where she studied Quaker women’s needle, shell, and wax work before 1800.

Edited by Laura Moseley, illustrated by Takako Copeland and designed by Chris Shortt

Published by Common Threads Press
ISBN: 9781916323476
72 pages

Founded in 2019 by Laura Moseley, Common Threads Press is a small, independent publisher of books and zines that uplift histories of creative work. Common Threads Press is inspired by and indebted to the rich history of independent, grassroots publishing that centres voices from the margins — spotlighting the political and cultural relevance of crafts that has long been overlooked or dismissed in mainstream publishing.