About Stone Creek Textiles & Bindery

I started to bind books almost by accident! I’d been a textile artist of various sorts for nearly 20 years and had reached a bit of a creative plateau. So, I was looking for some inspiration. My good friend and quilt artist, Leah Higgins, gave me a Coptic bound book she had made so, on the spur of the moment, I googled ‘book binding East Yorkshire’ and the first thing to come up was a one day workshop in Hull the following week with Glenn Malkin. I like to think it was fate giving me a kick in the direction I should take. We started with a pile of paper, some bits of board, some book cloth and thread and ended up with a proper little hard back book. It was so exciting …

That was it, I was hooked. I could see straight away that this would be a great way to use my hand dyed / screen printed / cyanotyped / inkjet printed fabrics in a new way. I could combine the skills I already had with a major love of my life, books!

I started taking more courses, practising my skills and adding new structures to my repertoire, from folded, origami style books to more formal, traditional leather bound styles. However, I gravitated towards the bindings that showed off the stitching used to create the book’s structure – it seemed such a shame to hide it with a cover. All of them can be made to a good quality finish at home with minimal, simple equipment, so, those are what I’ve focused on.

I’ve written two books, ‘Cyanotypes on Fabric’ and ‘Digital Imagery on Fabric’ and, following a very difficult few years, I was itching to write another one. I decided I had enough to say on these beautiful stitched bindings to warrant having a go – watch this space, as they say …