Selvedge Magazine

Selvedge Magazine Out and about, into the archive and behind the scenes of Selvedge, a magazine about cloth culture. www.selvedge.org
(297)

Selvedge Magazine: The fabric of your life: texile in Fashion, Fine Art, Interiors, Travel and Shopping.

WIN WIN WIN: 12 Days of Christmas - Day TwoToday, you have the chance to welcome a truly special piece into your home: a...
02/12/2025

WIN WIN WIN: 12 Days of Christmas - Day Two

Today, you have the chance to welcome a truly special piece into your home: a handmade Farmhouse Broom by Rosa Harradine, worth £190.

Crafted in West Wales using traditional materials — broomcorn, beech, ash or oak, nylon binding and a cork hanging loop — each broom combines strength with softness, pairing firm fibres with wispy ends that sweep dust with ease. With its hand-painted, eco-friendly handle and rich symbolism, it’s a tool designed to be both used and admired.

To enter, visit our Competitions page and complete the form for today’s draw. A new prize is revealed daily from 1–12 December, with winners announced on 13 December.

About Rosa Harradine;

In the wooded quiet of West Wales, broom and brush maker Rosa Harradine creates objects that restore intention and beauty to everyday rituals. Working with sustainable fibres — broomcorn, tampico and arenga — and harvesting handles from her own woodland, she cuts, seasons, carves and sands each piece before sealing it with linseed oil or leaving the bark intact. Her process is meticulous: measuring each stalk, sorting bundles by quality, binding layers, stitching and trimming — ensuring nothing less than excellence.

Rosa’s path to broom making began far from the workshop. Originally trained in music, she moved through spoon carving, pole-lathe turning and basketry before broomcraft captured her imagination. Five years on, she is recognised as a TOAST New Maker and one of The King’s Foundation 35 Under 35.

Find out more and enter the prize draw via selvedge.org > Community > Enter a Prize Draw.

Good luck!

-





-

WIN WIN WIN - 12 Days of Christmas - Day OneWe’re thrilled to offer the chance to win a limited-edition Fleur Cotton Rob...
01/12/2025

WIN WIN WIN - 12 Days of Christmas - Day One

We’re thrilled to offer the chance to win a limited-edition Fleur Cotton Robe by Olivia Morris. Handmade in England from an original bolt of pristine 1990s cotton chintz, this exquisite robe features blue hydrangeas and roses drifting across a peach-pink ground, finished with wide cuffed sleeves, a slim shawl collar and an effortless, elegant drape.

To enter, head to our Competitions page and submit the form for today’s draw. A new prize is revealed every day from 1–12 December, with winners announced on 13 December.

About Olivia Morris:

For designer Olivia Morris, nostalgia enriches the present. Working transparently and sustainably, she produces her small-batch collections — from footwear to loungewear and homeware — as close to home as possible. Her botanical palette draws from the flowers in her East Sussex garden, while vintage textiles play a starring role, many sourced from her own archive of pristine prints gathered over years of travel.

Craftsmanship anchors her practice: footwear is made in a third-generation family factory in Alicante, accessories in small UK workshops, and each piece of loungewear is made at home in England by a talented seamstress. Olivia knows exactly where every item comes from — and who made it.

Find out more and enter the prize draw via selvedge.org > Community > Enter a Prize Draw.

Good luck!

-





-

WIN WIN WIN — 12 Days of ChristmasCelebrate the season with Selvedge as we unveil twelve exceptional festive prizes — a ...
30/11/2025

WIN WIN WIN — 12 Days of Christmas

Celebrate the season with Selvedge as we unveil twelve exceptional festive prizes — a curated selection designed to inspire lovers of textiles, craft, design and thoughtful making. From artisan-made objects to beautifully crafted tools and materials, each prize reflects the creativity and craftsmanship at the heart of our community.

Save the Date!

From 1–12 December, we will be offering one unique prize each day as part of our annual Christmas prize draw. We publish one prize draw each day from 1 to 12 December, and the winners will be selected and announced on 13 December — just in time to bring a little extra festive cheer.

To take part, readers are encouraged to visit our 'Enter a Prize Draw' page daily. Simply complete the form to be in with a chance of winning — and feel free to return every day as new prizes are revealed!

This year’s giveaway is our way of sharing joy, and connecting our global community through the spirit of giving. Keep your eye on our feed for further updates — the first entry form goes live on 1 December. Let the festivities begin!

-



In knitwear, colour blocking functions as more than a stylistic flourish — it becomes a visual grammar, a way of structu...
30/11/2025

In knitwear, colour blocking functions as more than a stylistic flourish — it becomes a visual grammar, a way of structuring rhythm, tension, and harmony through sharply defined planes of colour.

Unlike woven textiles, where hues merge within the structure, knitting allows for abrupt chromatic shifts: solids meeting solids, stripes forming linear architectures, and chevrons or zigzags animating the surface with dynamic punctuation. It is a technique that thrives on clarity, contrast, and the emotional charge of juxtaposition.

In Selvedge Issue 127, Aurora, Sarah E. Braddock Clarke explores this rich terrain, tracing how contemporary designers are pushing colour blocking into new aesthetic and conceptual territory. Among them, Jo Gordon offers a compelling interpretation.

Trained first as a painter, she begins each piece with painted collage studies, allowing intuitive and unexpected relationships between colour to emerge before they migrate into knit. Her voluminous scarves — crafted in Scottish mills using 100% Scottish-spun lambswool certified by the Responsible Wool Standard and dyed to GOTS standards — wrap the wearer in enveloping bands of colour that range from exuberant brights to serene, tonal harmonies. Gordon’s graphic stripes, chequered edges, and zigzag motifs honour Scottish knitting traditions while reimagining them through a contemporary, joyfully chromatic lens.

Find out more in our current issue, available now.



-



FOR THE RECORD: The Index of American Design"In the 1930s and early 1940s, the United States took on one of its most amb...
29/11/2025

FOR THE RECORD: The Index of American Design

"In the 1930s and early 1940s, the United States took on one of its most ambitious art projects. To create the Index of American Design, well over 1,000 artists made more than 18,000 meticulous drawings of objects. The types of objects varied widely, but they included a large number of handwoven coverlets, which came from homes, museums, churches, and antique stores in cities and states across the country. The Index was intended to identify and preserve a uniquely American aesthetic – and to inspire contemporary design. This project was a national enterprise that employed a diverse group of people during the Great Depression. It was a division of the Federal Art Project (FAP) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The Index of American Design
comprised 37 offices in 34 states and Washington, DC, where the Index was headquartered.

But the Index was an uneven vision of the United States. It aimed to produce a shared identity through decorative arts. It was also a “kind of archaeology,” according to FAP director Holger Cahill. At the same time, it largely excluded, intentionally or by oversight,
Indigenous, African American, and Asian American objects. Cahill described the subject of the Index as the “practical, popular and folk arts of the peoples of European origin who created the material culture of this country.”

An artist and a librarian hatched the idea for the Index. In 1935, textile designer Ruth Reeves came to Romana Javitz, a librarian at the New York Public Library, with a problem. Reeves was motivated by the communities that made and used traditional crafts, but she struggled to find the reproductions she wanted to reference. Javitz agreed..."

Read more about the creation, ambitions, and limitations of the Index of American Design in Selvedge Issue 127, Aurora. In print now at selvedge.org, or available online as a digital subscriber.

-



-

Images:

1: Coverlet, drawn by Howard Iams, 1937
2: Zoar coverlet, drawn by Ralph Russell, 1939.
3: Coverlet (reverse), drawn by Cornelius Christoffels.
4: Coverlet, drawn by Alois E. Ulrich, 1938
5: Coverlet, drawn by Charles Goodwin, 1938

DIZZYING DELIGHTS: Alessandro Michele presents his first Valentino haute couture collection."Alessandro Michele titled h...
29/11/2025

DIZZYING DELIGHTS: Alessandro Michele presents his first Valentino haute couture collection.

"Alessandro Michele titled his first Valentino haute couture collection Vertigineux – or “dizzying” – suggesting the vast amount of archival material he consulted and the breadth and depth of the clothing he
showed. Telling Vogue’s Sarah Mower that he’d “been in the middle of a tornado,” it’s easy to think that Michele landed squarely in Oz considering this collection, with its dazzling technicolour hues, sparkling jewels, and playful attention to silhouettes.

Rather than L. Frank Baum, though, Michele cites Umberto Eco’s “The Infinity of Lists” as an epigraph before his artistic statement, which is printed on his website. It reads, in part: “The list is at the origin of culture. . . . And what does culture want? To make the infinite comprehensible. . . . And how, as human beings, do we cope with infinity? . . . Through lists, collections in museums, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. The list does not destroy culture; it creates it.”

Michele uses the list as his organising principle for Spring/Summer Haute Couture, finding infinite variation within listed items. In his runway show, he includes two lists. One, which Michele characterised
as a “river” to Vogue, consists of the backdrop: two rows of words spelled out in red lights that reveal literal and figurative connections with each look, including the hours spent on handwork as well as the fabrics, silhouettes, techniques, and inspirations, which range from individuals from the designer’s life to authors, literary theorists, cities, artworks, colours, literary genres, and, as Michele includes at the end of each list, “etcetera,” to hint at the seemingly infinite possibilities.
It is, as he says in his artist statement, “an ungrammatical list that proceeds through accumulation and juxtaposition.”...

Read more from this article by Kate Cavendish in the pages of Issue 127, Aurora, or online as a digital subscriber to Selvedge Magazine.



-



WHEN COMPUTERS WERE WOMEN: From punched cards to binary code.In 1838, a silk portrait of Joseph-Marie Jacquard was woven...
28/11/2025

WHEN COMPUTERS WERE WOMEN: From punched cards to binary code.

In 1838, a silk portrait of Joseph-Marie Jacquard was woven using an extraordinary 24,000 punched cards — a tiny textile that reshaped the future. Jacquard’s innovation, rooted in the rhythms of Lyon’s silk looms and the skilled labour of women pattern readers, introduced a binary system of holes and blanks that could instruct a machine.

What began as a way to speed up weaving became the conceptual seed of computing. Charles Babbage collected a copy of that portrait; Ada Lovelace saw its deeper significance, writing that “the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”

Today, artists continue to explore this intertwining of code and cloth. On TC2 digital looms, makers like Kristina Austi and Kari Dyrdal translate photographs, memory, and architecture into woven form. And in 2018, during a residency at CERN, artist Crystal Bennes uncovered a 1970s particle-collider programme stored on 2,131 punched cards. She and a team of women weavers transformed its binary data into When Computers Were Women — a remarkable installation bridging early computation and contemporary textile practice.

From silk workshops to server rooms, the logic of the loom continues to shape our world. Jacquard could never have imagined where those first punched cards would lead...

Read all about it in Selvedge Issue 127, Aurora, in an article by Juliet Dunmur. To purchase your copy or join us as a subscriber, head to selvedge.org or tap on our link in bio.

-



SUIT YOURSELF: 100 Years of Menswear, 1750–1850Rijksmuseum, AmsterdamUntil 15 March 2026The Rijksmuseum’s latest exhibit...
27/11/2025

SUIT YOURSELF: 100 Years of Menswear, 1750–1850
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Until 15 March 2026

The Rijksmuseum’s latest exhibition invites us to rethink everything we assume about historic menswear. Suit Yourself reveals a century in which Dutch gentlemen embraced colour, silk, embroidery, and silhouette with a confidence that challenges the modern myth of masculine restraint.

From flamboyant influences like Britain’s macaroni style to the quiet sophistication that followed the French Revolution, these garments map shifting ideas around identity, status, and the body. A standout? A blue silk waistcoat from c.1745 whose interior shaping device hints at early body-conscious fashion long before the gym mirror.

The exhibition also speaks powerfully to today’s concerns. An exquisite waistcoat repurposed from an 18th-century Chinese silk dress spotlights the era’s resourcefulness—an early form of textile reuse that resonates with contemporary conversations around sustainability.

Crucially, Suit Yourself reframes fashion history through a distinctly Dutch lens. Drawing on global trade routes—Indian chintz, Chinese silk, Turkish-inspired motifs—the exhibition reveals how Dutch menswear was shaped by craftsmanship at home and materials from across the world.

While the show acknowledges the colonial systems entwined with this material richness, it also reminds us that fashion’s stories are never singular. Here, global exchange, gender, class, and craftsmanship converge in garments that still speak with surprising clarity.
A rich, thoughtful journey into the worlds men once wore.

Art historian, curator, writer, and lecturer Dr. Timea Andrea Lelik writes about the exhibition in Selvedge Issue 127, Aurora. Tap on our link in bio or head to selvedge.org for your copy.

-





lelik

WHAT GOES AROUND, COMES AROUND:Tia Keobounpheng – Exploring her ancestral history through geometry, colour, and thread.G...
26/11/2025

WHAT GOES AROUND, COMES AROUND:
Tia Keobounpheng – Exploring her ancestral history through geometry, colour, and thread.

Geometry becomes ancestry. Thread becomes testimony. And colour becomes a way of asking the oldest questions: Who am I? Who do I come from?

In her layered, meditative practice, Tia Keobounpheng turns geometry into a tool for ancestral seeking. Beginning with concentric circles and building dense “warp fields” of parallel thread, she allows colour, structure, and intuition to reveal what history left unsaid. Her front-and-back compositions — one side intention, the other the honest tangle — mirror the “loose threads” of ancestral research, where clarity and absence coexist.

Keobounpheng’s recent exhibitions, including Revealing Threads and the Circle Round series, deepen a reconnection to her Finnish and Sámi heritage, approaching lineage with responsibility, vulnerability, and a willingness to reimagine belonging. Through vibrant geometry and repeated stitchwork, she creates a new kind of portraiture that maps the emotional, spiritual, and generational threads that shape us.

Read more in an article by Carol Steuer, featured in the current issue of Selvedge Magazine: Issue 127, Aurora.



-

Magazine

Did you enjoy the illustration from our Winter Fair poster this year? Well, now you can share your festive greetings wit...
25/11/2025

Did you enjoy the illustration from our Winter Fair poster this year? Well, now you can share your festive greetings with our beautifully printed holiday card, featuring the exclusive seasonal design by illustrator Olesia Sekeresh.

Printed on 350gsm silk stock with a smooth finish, each folded card is sized at 148 × 148 mm, and comes with a crisp white envelope and a blank interior, ready for your own thoughtful message.

Available individually or as a set of 10, they bring a touch of Selvedge style to your seasonal correspondence.

Olesia, a visual artist from Ukraine, has an illustration practice that spans editorial work, posters, book design, monumental graphics and art installations. You may recognise her work from our Selvedge Winter Fair illustration and her artwork for “C is for Chopins” in Alphabet of Textiles, Selvedge Issue 127 Aurora.

Perfect for textile lovers, design enthusiasts and thoughtful gift-givers alike, you will find our cards online in the Selvedge Shop. Head to selvedge.org to learn more.

@ olesia_sekeresh

-



To all the dedicated merchants and makers — and to every visitor who wrapped up warm and joined us for this year’s Selve...
24/11/2025

To all the dedicated merchants and makers — and to every visitor who wrapped up warm and joined us for this year’s Selvedge Winter Fair — thank you.

What a remarkable day it turned out to be. From the moment the doors opened at the Royal Horticultural Halls, the space filled with energy: the spark that ignites when passionate makers meet those who cherish the beauty and integrity of handmade crafts. We are also deeply grateful to the Royal Horticultural Halls team for accommodating us at such short notice and helping us bring the fair to life so seamlessly.

Watching our merchants and makers share their work was truly inspiring. Each carefully displayed piece carried a story of techniques handed down, skills honed over decades, and ideas that bridge past and present. And as visitors wandered through the hall, discovering their own treasures, you could feel the delight ripple through the room.

Conversations wove their way between the stalls too, with old friends reconnecting over beloved crafts, new friendships sparked by shared admiration, and knowledge generously exchanged between exhibitors and enthusiasts.

We had an unforgettable day — one made possible by you: the makers and exhibitors who pour heart and skill into every piece, and the visitors who understand that textiles and crafts carry history, artistry and human connection.

Until we gather again, thank you.

The Selvedge Team.

-


In our current issue, we explore how artist and weaver Amber Jensen reimagines what hand-weaving can be, drawing on the ...
24/11/2025

In our current issue, we explore how artist and weaver Amber Jensen reimagines what hand-weaving can be, drawing on the legacies of Mary Meigs Atwater and Anni Albers while carving out a practice that feels wholly her own.

In her Minneapolis studio, she begins each day with improvisational weaving, letting colour, texture and instinct guide her hands. The loom becomes both a grounding place and a space of possibility. Sometimes she follows pattern; other times she breaks the grid entirely, diving through the warp threads to create organic marks, bold interruptions, and joyful imperfections.

Her work is slow by design. A quiet refusal of mass-made sameness. A belief that making by hand still carries the power to connect us — to the past, to the natural world, and to each other.

Influenced by the craft legacies of Appalachia and later Scandinavian schools of making, Jensen moves fluidly between drawings, tapestries, basket-like forms, functional objects and fine art. She weaves with rule-breaking confidence, a skill honed through years of rigorous training now expressed through playful colour, appliqué, needle-felting, chunky stitches and the dual softness and strength of wool.

Her recent collaboration with the historic Faribault Woollen Mill translates her richly worked textiles into jacquard-woven blankets — pieces that sold out before they were even finished. Another reminder that handweaving is very much alive, evolving, and full of wonder.

Jensen’s practice shows us that cloth doesn’t have to choose: it can be a bag, a blanket, a sculpture, or a story. And like generations of weavers before her, she continues to stretch what’s possible on the loom.

Common Threads is written by Jessica Smith and appears in Selvedge Issue 127: Aurora — available now.
jensen

-





-

Image credits:
Rik Sferra, Caroline Yang

Address

14 Milton Park
London
N65QA

Telephone

+447723465522

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Selvedge Magazine posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Selvedge Magazine:

Shortcuts

Share

Category

Our story

At the heart of the Selvedge story is a cerebral and sensual addiction to cloth and with that an appreciation of the beautifully made and carefully considered. Exploring and understanding the history, future, politics and aesthetics of textiles with its own distinct voice. Much more than a magazine; a valuable source of inspiration for designers and devotees alike. We acknowledge the significance of textiles as a part of everyone’s story. We are surrounded by cloth from the cradle to the grave and by exploring our universal emotional connection to fibre we share the stories and values that mean the most to us. Join us and make our stories part of your story.www.selvedge.org