Embroidery Magazine – January-February 2025

Summary

Metamorphosis by Fiona Cowell, winner of the inaugural Chairman's Award at the Hand & Lock Prize for Embroidery, opens Embroidery Magazine's January-February 2025 issue with a cover that signals the year ahead in textile art. The issue previews 2025's key exhibitions, introduces the Guild Grads tipped for the top, and profiles artists from Bali to Scotland. Blair Martin Cahill's free-motion embroideries and Sami artist Britta Marakatt-Labba's environmental activism anchor the feature well.

The front section covers the Textile Society's Museums, Archive and Conservation Award projects, including the conservation of a Jane Austen handkerchief. Out & About suggests stitch holidays in France and Scotland. A Head of the Curve profiles Balinese artist Citra Sasmita's boundary-crossing exhibition. The Sewing Room visits Sian Martin's Somerset studio with a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking marshland. The features section runs 10 pieces, from Hanny Newton swapping gold for straw to Carola van Dyke's self-directed stitch retreat.

The reviews section covers Jakkai Siributr's Into Another Land exhibition and the book Women Pioneers of the Arts and Crafts Movement. What's On lists textile events across the UK for the coming 2 months.

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Content Guide

▸ Cover Story

p.14 · WOW FACTOR: The Hand & Lock Prize for Embroidery
Fiona Cowell's Metamorphosis won the inaugural Chairman's Award at the 2024 Hand & Lock Prize. The piece uses layered organza and metallic thread to depict a butterfly emerging from geometric chrysalis forms. The judging panel cited the structural integrity of the freestanding wings. The winning entries are exhibited at the Bankside Gallery until 12 February 2025.

▸ Features

p.20 · Back to the Future: A whistlestop tour of the year ahead
Preview of 2025's major embroidery and textile exhibitions across the UK, including a Barbican retrospective of 1960s textile art and a tour of Sami textile works in Scandinavia. The article includes a fold-out calendar with exhibition dates, gallery addresses and booking windows.

p.26 · Listed Status: Anthony Stevens, an artist obsessed with lists
Stevens creates embroidered works on graph paper that catalogue everyday obsessions — the contents of his fridge, every train he missed in 2023, the number of steps from his front door to the station (847). His work uses single-strand thread on perforated paper for a dot-matrix effect.

p.32 · Wondrous Creatures: Blair Martin Cahill
The American artist creates free-motion embroideries of taxidermy specimens and fantastical hybrid animals. Each piece uses 8,000 to 12,000 metres of thread per square metre of fabric. She works without a sketch, stitching directly onto the backing fabric at 400 stitches per minute.

p.38 · Fresh Talent: Guild Grads — Meet three tipped for the top
Three recent embroidery graduates selected by a panel of Guild of Embroidery judges. One uses heat-soluble fabric that dissolves after stitching, leaving only the thread structure. A second incorporates conductive thread to make embroidered touch sensors.

p.40 · As Good As Gold: Hanny Newton swaps gold for straw
Newton's new series uses wheat straw as a substitute for gold thread in traditional ecclesiastical embroidery techniques. The straw is split, soaked and gilded using a 17th-century Dutch process. Each piece takes approximately 120 hours to complete.

p.44 · Creative Activism: Britta Marakatt-Labba
The Sami artist highlights environmental threats to Scandinavian reindeer-herding territories through embroidered narrative panoramas. One work, spanning 4 metres, traces the seasonal migration routes threatened by mining concessions. Her stitch technique combines Swedish and Sami traditions.

▸ Regulars

p.07 · Embroidery Loves: Jane Austen's handkerchief
The Textile Society's Museums, Archive and Conservation Award is supporting the conservation of a handkerchief embroidered by Jane Austen, held at the Jane Austen Museum in Chawton. The conservation will stabilise the cotton fabric. The handkerchief is not currently on public display.

p.10 · Out & About: Stitch holidays
Two options for 2025: a week-long embroidery retreat in the Dordogne focusing on crewel work, and a 4-day workshop on the Isle of Skye specialising in natural dye extraction from local plants. Both include accommodation and materials in the price.

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Editor's Take

Embroidery Magazine's first issue of 2025 is the strongest edition of the year for exhibition previews — the fold-out calendar and the Back to the Future tour give the working textile artist a genuine planning tool. The Blair Martin Cahill feature is technically fascinating (12,000 metres of thread per square metre is a specific fact that will make any embroiderer stop and recalculate their own thread use). The weakness is the Guild Grads piece — three artists in 3 pages means none gets enough space to show more than one work each. The Sewing Room is becoming formulaic — the "artist in a beautiful studio" format has run for 6 consecutive issues. The conservation piece on Austen's handkerchief is too short to satisfy needlework historians. This issue is for the practising textile artist and embroidery enthusiast, not for the casual crafter.

Strengths
• Hand & Lock Prize winners with Bankside Gallery exhibition dates
• Blair Martin Cahill thread-count density data
• 2025 exhibitions fold-out calendar

Weaknesses
• Guild Grads section too thin for 3 featured artists
• Sewing Room studio-visit format has become repetitive

Verdict: Recommended — The exhibition previews and Hand & Lock coverage make this a useful reference for 2025 planning.