Stitching Freedom is a new release from Common Threads Press in which embroidery historian and curator Isabella Rosner unpicks twelve embroidered histories to discover what can be created when freedom is out of reach.
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, looking at the work of people who have embroidered to distract, to reflect or to calm, from Mary, Queen of Scots to Lorina Bulwer.
Isabella Rosner is Curator of the Royal School of Needlework, Research Associate at Witney Antiques and host of the 'Sew What?' podcast.