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Psst; do you want to know a secret? First, you'll have to tell us yours! According to the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , the average person keeps a whopping 13 secrets and five secrets that they have never told to another living soul! Everyone knows that keeping things in is bad for us, so how do you find a safe and therapeutic way to let it go? Well, you can sing about it, talk about it, write a letter and freeze it, write a poem and burn it, or shout your secret to the wind and let it carry your words off scattered in the breeze.  Or you can give it to us: stitch your secret and send it to us for safe keeping.  Trivial, funny or deadly serious, it matters not. Letting a secret go in a safe place allows you to forgive yourself and let the past go.  Sharing a secret is an act of self-love. We are the Profanity Embroidery Group of Whitstable, Kent and you are invited to stitch your secret (profanity free) and make it part of an American style crazy quilt....

Tracy Chevalier joins forces with charity to help prisoners build their self-esteem and hope “It was a challenge. I had just joined Fine Cell Work. Caroline, the volunteer teacher, asked me to do a square for the quilt and explained what it was about. She said what do you guys dream about when in prison. I said to be honest I don’t dream any more. I haven’t dreamed for years. To me prison is all about madness and chaos and tattoos. Caroline saw my tattoos and said we haven’t got one of those on the quilt. To me tattoos and people are very similar. It tells a story of a time and a place, it’s a permanent marker. It’s like me on this earth. ” – Prisoner partaking in the Sleep Quilt project “Prisoners may initially agree to work with Fine Cell Work because they will be paid, but most of them get far more out of the experience than money … Many inmates suffer from low self-esteem. They have never made anything constructive or beautiful before, and have never been praised. Doing so is like...

A new exhibition at Rheged, Cumbria’s foremost arts centre, supported by Arts Council England, will challenge perceptions of quilt making this spring, revealing a strong and vibrant contemporary craft form. New Quilting , an exclusive exhibition at Rheged, will reveal the new face of contemporary quilting, an art form now just as likely to be found hanging on a gallery wall or urban loft apartment as it is in a rural farmhouse. Quilts by  over 30 national and Cumbrian makers  have been selected for their craftsmanship and design, colour and innovation. The unique story behind each piece will also be told in the exhibition, either through accompanying sketches and material revealing how each quilt came to be, or through the storytelling ability of the quilt itself. Alicia Merrett: The Island John Stokes, Arts Manager at Rheged, said “Quilting has been part of the needlework tradition in Europe since the fifth century and our exhibition celebrates those continuing the tradition ...

 Illustration: Clare Plug. Ice Crack 2 , 2008. The New Zealand textile artist Clare Plug has spent the last few years of her career developing a fascinating body of work that entails intimately observed details along with wider conceptions and observations of the most rarely visited of all the planets continents. In 2006 Plug was lucky enough to visit the continent of Antarctica as part of a fellowship, staying with the official government Antarctica NZ at Scott Base in the vicinity of the Ross Ice Shelf. It is no small exaggeration to say that this experience fundamentally changed her views and the entire aspect of her work, so much so that much of the textile art work that she produces to this day is haunted by this most spectacular and hauntingly beautiful continent. Illustration: Clare Plug. Ice Crack 2 (detail), 2008. The three works shown here are examples of Plug's Antarctica Series which explores a number of aspects of the continent from the fragile and relatively recent...

Illustration: Judith Plotner. Adirondack Journal I. Many creative journeys are supremely private; others less so, many are degrees in between. The work of textile and mixed media artist Judith Plotner, although largely falling into the former category, can still be considered purely as an example of the rich world that can be composed from the elements that go to make up a mixed media base. Illustration: Judith Plotner. Slate Valley. Plotner uses the broad spectrum of the creative arts, bringing into her compositions the sensibilities of a fine art painting background, as well as that of printmaking, collage and textiles. The great strength of mixed media is the fact that layering and juxtapositioning can be achieved not only with the raw materials available within the different mediums, but also with that of mediums themselves. It is always fascinating to observe how sometimes a medium can complement another, while at other times the opposite can be both the aim and result. This can c...

Illustration: Marlene Cohen. Healing. Marlene Cohen is a British textile artist that has taken her own strong and contemporary attitude towards her chosen medium, and created a distinctive style of composition and layering that is entirely her own. Cohen uses both printmaking and fine art disciplines, along with the usual aspects of textile work such as layering and stitching, to produce work that although technically part of the quilt medium, has managed to stretch that medium farther than most. Although Cohen works in a wide range of colours, tones and textures, I have chosen instead to concentrate on a series of pieces that she has produced in a much lower and much more minimal colour scheme. Shoah is a series of pieces that, although seemingly stark and severe, are in fact full of the most astounding build up of imagery and text that is strong in graphic, illustrative and fine art techniques. Illustration: Marlene Cohen. Target Zero. These pieces, to my mind at least, seem to have...

Illustration: Barbara W. Watler. Fingerprint series #50: Unity. The textile artwork of Barbara W. Watler is intriguing in more ways than one. She gives us blown up images of small, intimate areas of life that we might well recognise as belonging to part of the near micro world. Through her unique imagery of the natural world that she sees around her, the artist allows us to connect to the intimate and the solitary, pinpointing the stand alone elements that make all aspects of the natural world unique. She helps us to understand how utterly unique and diverse this world really is. Illustration: Barbara W. Watler. Fingerprint Series #46: Vortex. Watler has a number of differing projects and sets of work, but probably her most well known series is that of her Fingerprint collection. This series of art pieces that now number more than fifty, is continually growing and transforming as it develops. It deals with the all too human twin obsessions of identity and the loss of that identity. F...

Illustration: Jette Clover. White Wall 1 , 2009. The work of the textile and mixed media artist Jette Clover deals with the graffiti of life. She has chosen to represent the visual language of the human species through the use of the written, rather than that of the spoken language. This is an important point to make, particularly as the written word becomes evermore increasingly vital to the everyday running of our contemporary world. However, although written language itself is relatively new in comparison to the age of the human species as a whole, representational markers of our presence have long been seen as a necessary part of our lives. Whether writing with recognised lettering, pictograms or other symbols, all are representations of both the individual and the culture they inhabited. It is this recognition of the potential of the individual through mark-making in whatever fashion, which seems to be at the heart of these particular pieces of textile work. Illustration: Jette Cl...

Illustration: Virginia Abrams. Reflections 5 , 2009. I am always pleasantly surprised and even intrigued when considering how many contemporary textile artists arrive at the genre from such diverse creative journeys and backgrounds. It perhaps says much about the comprehensive appeal of textile art that so many individuals feel compelled to take up the genre. Obviously, because of the diversity of these individual artists, textile art itself broadens its parameters immensely. The American textile artist Virginia Abrams has a background in organic chemistry and biochemistry. She is fascinated with the complex interactions of the natural world and her work is centred on this fascination. Abrams work runs on themes suggested by nature. I have chosen one of these themes water, to illustrate this article. All of these pieces are literally reflections. However, it would be misleading to believe that they are merely optical observations conceived by Abrams. These are complex recipes using ing...