crewel embroidery

Crewel is the art of embroidering by hand with wool thread on linen fabric. Wool & Hoop offers crewel supplies and a line of crewel embroidery kits featuring original designs by artist Katherine Shaughnessy. With crewelwork, there is no counting, no grids... just free-form embroidery. You'll enjoy learning all the crewel stitches – they're fun to master. Try crewelwork and discover how the lush wool threads sit up high on the rich linens to make your craft really pop. You can get started with Shaughnessy's books, The New Crewel and New Crewel: The Motif Collection – both offer loads of her original designs, fun projects, and classic embroidery stitches.

Katherine Shaughnessy is Wool & Hoop’s owner and designer. She learned crewel embroidery from her mother when she was a child growing up in Cleveland, Ohio in the '70s. Shaughnessy has been sewing ever since, whether by hand or machine. It was in art school that she began using needle and thread to construct large sculptures and to piece together her collage paintings. In 1997, Shaughnessy earned an MFA in Fiber Arts from the Art Institute of Chicago. Soon after, she married Tom Michael and together they left the city to explore the country, living fulltime in a campervan. Vanlife eventually led them to Marfa, Texas, where they nestled in for well over a decade. There they founded a public radio station, got involved in local politics, had two kids, and immersed themselves in the little town that was quickly becoming an international art hub. Somewhere in that time, Shaughnessy became nostalgic for the crewelwork that she remembered as a young girl. After searching far and wide for contemporary kits, she made her own “new crewel” designs and launched her company Wool & Hoop. She has written two books, The New Crewel (2005) and New Crewel: The Motif Collection (2014). Recently, Shaughnessy and her family moved to Boise, Idaho where Michael runs the local public radio and she continues to stitch, paint and make sculptures while raising children and chickens. Shaughnessy’s art is at katherineshaughnessy.com.

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