Stitching Freedom: Embroidery and Incarceration

For centuries, people have stitched in good times and in bad, finding strength in the needle moving in and out of fabric. Stitching Freedom explores the embroidery made in prisons and mental health hospitals — those who have embroidered to distract, to reflect or to calm. From Mary, Queen of Scots to Lorina Bulwer, embroidery historian and curator Isabella Rosner unpicks twelve embroidered histories to discover what can be created when freedom is out of reach.

About the Author

Isabella Rosner is Curator of the Royal School of Needlework, Research Associate at Witney Antiques and host of the Sew What? podcast.

Isabella is an art historian who studies material culture from the seventeenth through nineteenth century. She specialises in the study of early modern women’s needlework, especially British examples, and schoolgirl samplers across all time periods. Isabella is a 2023 BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker and has just completed her PhD at King’s College London, where she studied Quaker women’s needle, shell, and wax work before 1800.

Edited by Laura Moseley

Illustrated by Takako Copeland

Designed by Chris Short