Perfect for those interested in May Morris’s style of decorative embroidery, this new Ashmolean publication offers a collection of her designs to discover. It includes an in-depth exploration of her techniques influenced by 19th-century art movements, along with clear instructions to help you apply these methods to your own embroidery and arts & crafts projects.

This informative book also includes a digital element to facilitate with up-scaling patterns and to provide easy access to the instruction booklets. May Morris perfectly embodies the Arts and Crafts movement’s ideal of the designer-maker, with her surviving works showcasing her exceptional creativity and craftsmanship. Today, her embroidery pieces are highly prized at auctions, and her life and artistry continue to be widely researched and celebrated. A pioneer of decorative needlework in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, her combination of deep art-historical understanding with expert craftsmanship continues to inspire contemporary designers and embroiderers today.

May Morris (1862–1938), younger daughter of William Morris, was a significant figure in the British Arts and Crafts movement and a pioneer of ‘art embroidery’. She ran the embroidery department of Morris & Co., as well as designing textiles, wallpapers and jewellery. May was also an influential teacher and lectured in the UK and America. Following the critically acclaimed exhibition at the William Morris Gallery in 2017, research into her life and work has mushroomed, bringing her out of her father’s shadow. Inspiring designers and practitioners today, May Morris’s work is much sought after by those keen to acquire a deeper understanding of her creative process and that of her contemporaries. May Morris described design as ‘the very essence and soul of beautiful embroidery’, and ranked it chief among the four elements that make a work truly ‘artistic’. The Ashmolean Museum holds one of the largest repositories of her designs, though few of these have appeared in print or been added to the Museum’s online collections. Drawing on the Ashmolean archive, this book aims to make the designs more widely accessible to embroiderers, not only equipping them with the tools to create their own projects based on May Morris’s working methods, but also providing them with the historical context to place their work and practice in the continuum of decorative needlework.

Lynn Hulse is an independent textile historian and practitioner specialising in needlework from the 16th to the early 20th centuries, and her primary area of research is art embroidery for the domestic interior, c. 1860–1914. She is regularly invited to give lectures to museums, historic houses, tour groups and societies connected with textiles and the decorative arts in the UK, Ireland and North America, and has organised textile conferences and symposia on behalf of the Textile Society, Ashmolean Museum, and other bodies.