A STITCH OUT OF TIME

French artist Anaïs Beaulieu learnt the craft of embroidery from her grandmother, a practice passed on through the generations of women in her family. A Stitch Out of Time features images of her embroidery on throwaway plastic bags, typically used for disposing waste. The book plays with two powerful themes: environmental degradation symbolised by the ubiquitous take-over of our surroundings by plastic and the slow time of creation, whether of a tree, or a piece of embroidery.

A Stitch Out of Time is a result of collaborative artisanal processes: embroidery, tailoring, screen-printing and book-binding. Each cover features an inlaid panel of embroidered plastic, the endsheets are silkscreen-printed by hand and all copies are carefully packaged in cotton tote bags — one side is specially embroidered and the other is for the readers to fill-in themselves.


Read a blog post by Anaïs Beaulieu — Hidden Threads: Making A Stitch Out of Time — that goes behind the book to explore the ideas and processes that informed this project.