Stitching for Wellbeing: Batsford Brings Four Authors to London Textile Month
Down a staircase at 266 Hackney Road, beneath Batsford Books, a bookshop devoted to art and craft, sits a bright, light-filled gallery that has hosted over thirty exhibitions since it opened in 2022. Alongside workshops, book signings and artist events, recent shows have ranged from Svitlana Dovbush's landscapes marked by war to a group exhibition built around ritual and symbolic imagery. Above ground, the shop holds a carefully chosen stock of Batsford titles alongside Taschen, Thames & Hudson, the V&A and Hoxton Mini Press, sitting in the creative stretch of Hackney Road that spreads out towards Columbia Road.
The premises at 94 High Holborn, where the business moved to in 1893, a little further up the road from the original shop. From ‘A Batsford Century’, Batsford 1943.
It is a fitting home for a publisher that has spent nearly two centuries making books worth keeping. Batsford has been publishing on art and architecture since 1843, and by the close of the nineteenth century had become known for illustrated non-fiction that rewarded the eye as much as the mind. Its textile titles carry that same attention through: a book on embroidery or weaving does not just describe the practice, it echoes the care of it.
This September, as part of London Textile Month, Batsford brings that spirit to the Museum of the Home on Thursday 10 September for a one-day festival built around a single idea: stitching as a way back to wellbeing. Four authors will introduce their new books before joining a panel on what making with thread actually brings to their lives. As it turns out, it's rather a lot!
Portrait of Jessie Cutts and her new publication, Free-Form Quilts and Patchwork
Jessie Cutts asks quilters to let go of the exactness the craft is famous for. In Free-Form Quilts and Patchwork, mistakes are not corrected out of the work. They stay, becoming part of its shape, in a way that feels like a small act of forgiveness towards the maker as much as the material.
Portrait of Deena Beverley and her new publication, Playful Stitch
Deena Beverley calls her book "messy play for grownups", a return to the toy box and the stationery cupboard as a way of reconnecting with unpressured, childlike making. Her earlier book, written with Cas Holmes, grew from something more raw, an attempt to describe how stitching can hold us together in crisis. That honesty about difficulty, and the relief that comes from working through it with a needle, runs through both books.
Portrait of Catherine-Marie Longtin and her new publication, Log Cabin Quilt Blocks
Catherine-Marie Longtin left a career in cognitive science to sew full time, and her hundred variations on the log cabin block read like a record of patience rewarded, one idea followed all the way through. What began as a simple question, how many ways can a single block be reimagined, grew into a body of work that treats repetition itself as a form of discovery, each new variation teaching her something the last one hadn't.
Portrait of Dr Claire Wellesley-Smith and her new publication, Reflective Stitch
And Dr Claire Wellesley-Smith, whose earlier books Slow Stitch and Resilient Stitch have shaped how many of us think about textiles and care, returns with Reflective Stitch. Built from years of community projects in former industrial textile towns, and her own decade-long daily practice, Stitch Journal, her work insists that cloth can carry memory, grief and connection as faithfully as it carries pattern.
There is a reason this kind of gathering matters more, not less, as the world fills with content generated in seconds and screens that ask nothing of our hands. A stitch takes time to make and cannot be rushed into being by anyone or anything else. It asks for patience, for touch, for the small decision made again and again until a pattern emerges.
That slowness is not a limitation. It is the point. To sit in a room with four people who have built their working lives around a needle and thread, and to hear them speak honestly about grief, play, precision and its absence, is to be reminded of something easy to forget: that making things with our own hands remains one of the most reliable ways back to ourselves.
We look forward to seeing you at this event, for a heartwarming celebration of stitch and community.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Quilt detail by Jessie Cutts.
All further images as credited in captions, and courtesy of the artists and Batsford Books.