Stitching Freedom: Embroidery and Incarceration, Isabella Rosner

In Stitching Freedom, the humble act of stitching is reframed as an act of resistance, solace and personal expression in some of history’s most constrained settings. Isabella Rosner — curator, historian and host of the Sew What? podcast — delves into the hidden lives behind needle and thread, exploring embroidery produced in prisons and mental health hospitals, where makers stitched to distract, reflect, calm or assert identity when freedom was otherwise denied. From the needlework attributed to Mary, Queen of Scots to the evocative samplers of Lorina Bulwer, the book places embroidered cloth at the crossroads of material culture and lived experience — where thread becomes testimony, surface becomes narrative, and the repeated motion of needle in fabric offers a quiet counterpart to confinement.

Rather than being a catalogue of pretty stitches, Stitching Freedom reads like a poetic material archive: twelve case studies that reveal how embroidery can hold memory, emotion, resistance and resilience. Each vignette is supported by rich imagery and well-framed commentary, inviting the reader to slow-see not only motifs and workmanship, but the hands that made them and the conditions under which they did so. In Selvedge terms, it’s a reminder that cloth — like all textiles — carries the imprint of human life as much as pigment, fibre and technique.

About the Author
Isabella Rosner is an art historian specialising in material culture and needlework. She serves as Curator of the Royal School of Needlework and is a Research Associate at Witney Antiques. She has completed a PhD at King’s College London, where her research focused on women’s needlework practices across historical periods, and was named a 2023 BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker. Rosner’s work often brings overlooked textile histories — especially women’s labour, domestic practice and needlework archive — into broader cultural and academic conversation.

Publication date: 2024
Publisher: Common Threads Press
Pages: 72
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 9781916323476