Connected Threads: Tactile Social History, Lynn Setterington

Connecting Threads stitches together a lifetime of socially engaged textile projects, spanning over four decades from 1981 to 2024. Through twelve richly documented initiatives—from intimate embroidered fragments capturing everyday life in South London and Yorkshire, to monumental site-specific banners co-created with construction workers in northern England—the work becomes tactile reportage: cloth as social document, textured memory, and communal dialogue. Each project is presented with beautiful photography, reflective narrative, and practical insight into how socially engaged craft can thread together issues of identity, sustainability, health, and cohesion, whilst navigating the joys and dilemmas of collaborative making.

More than a craft manual, this is an artist’s memoir via stitch. Setterington offers generous process notes, candid reflections on workshops and fieldwork, and an exploration of the subtle ways textiles carry witness—embodying community stories, commemorating lives, and knitting marginal voices into the visual archive . The result is a book that feels like a stitched conversation: personal, political, textured, and utterly human.

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About the Author
Dr Lynn Setterington is a respected British textile artist, Senior Lecturer and Course Leader in MA Design for Health & Wellbeing at Manchester Metropolitan University, and a PhD graduate of UCA Farnham. Her hand-stitched quilts, embroideries, and community-led projects are held in collections at the V&A, Whitworth Art Gallery, Crafts Council, and IQSC, and her practice consistently traverses craft, activism, memory and ethnography.

Publication date: 2025
Publisher: Quickthorn Press
Pages: 95
ISBN: 9781739316051