How I accidentally became a writer

And how self-publishing has shaped my career

I never expected to call myself a writer. I never expected to call myself an artist, either, but here I am, aged 51 and very much both writer and artist. I started my working life as a museum professional after a couple of academic degrees and from the start I wrote exhibition text, guidebooks and online learning resources. I found I was reasonably good at it and I enjoyed it, which was a huge surprise to me as I had hated essay writing for my A Levels and BA degree. My Museum Studies Masters Degree was actually really helpful, focussing on concise, clear language required for museum information and labelling. That training and my work in museum learning, is what helped me to be good at writing instructional text which is where my freelance writing really got going. 20 years ago I started blogging, writing about what I was making and sometimes offering instructions alongside. I also started teaching textile techniques as my main bread and butter income in the early years of self-employment. This practice helped me hone the language of how to make something and understand what words were best for describing something you do with your hands in sewing. It’s more complicated that most people realise! I didn’t plan to write sewing books, but this combination of teaching and writing on my blog got me noticed by publishers and I was invited to propose a book for A&C Black (Now Bloomsbury) in 2007. That book became Sew Eco, published in 2009 and it was closely followed by Sew It Up, a manual of practical and decorative sewing. I then wrote Fabric Manipulation, the book I am best known for and that came out in 2014.

At that point I decided to make a change in my working life and shifted to focussing more on my own artist practice than my teaching and practical techniques writing. It’s been a wild decade of all kinds of wonderful things and all kinds of chaos, stress and changes. It was a financial risk to focus on my own work rather than teaching others, but it has paid off and I have built a successful artist career and my own small collection of self-published books and booklets. This change was also prompted by chronic illness which I was beginning to get to grips with at that time (after almost 10 years) and I had to change the way I worked. Writing and publishing became part of the creative portfolio that enables me to work alongside my health.

I created my first solo exhibition in 2015 and chose to create a small catalogue to go alongside it, and that was my first self-published print – it’s only tiny, and I stitched the pages together myself on my sewing machine! It’s taken 10 years to sell out of the print run of this, but I finally have and now it’s just digital copies available. 

Then came Criminal Quilts – this was a huge research and exhibition project which eventually extended over 12 years. In the middle phase I decided to produce another exhibition catalogue for the exhibition in 2018. It very soon became a much larger book, with about one third about my work and the rest a history book about the prisoner photographs that were central to the project. I opted to work with a professional graphic designer at this point because I was so focussed on creating the exhibition and artwork. She did an amazing job of it and she’s working on my new book Tangled right now. I had Criminal Quilts printed at a small, local print company in Leicester, a mile from my then home. They were so generous and helpful that I have continue to return to this printer, even if it is more expensive than others. At the time of the first edition of Criminal Quilts, it was affordable to use recycled paper too, something that has become far more expensive since then, which is massively disappointing. I revised and reprinted Criminal Quilts in 2020 after selling out of the first print run through the exhibitions. This time I bought an ISBN number and made the book much more official – copies are in the UK copyright libraries which is very pleasing. I’m still the main supplier and stocks of the books have moved house with me and filled up many loft and cupboard spaces, although this one is winding down now and I hope to sell the remaining copies in a sale this year to make space for Tangled, which is twice the size at A4. 

Between these two major publications I’ve written and published a series of three Making Meaning Journals, these are booklets that explore the work I made in my Cultures of Care funded projects and together combine into a brilliant record of my work 2023-2025. I also created Lost Threads, a catalogue for my Mary Linwood exhibition of 2025 at Leicester Museum. This is a smaller publication, a slim 60 page but one that is beautiful and very important as the only publication specifically about Mary Linwood that has colour images. It also includes my own textile work made for the exhibition. This again was printed locally but this one I designed myself for reasons of speed and budget. I had learned enough to create a basic book design through creating Textiles in Lockdown for Gawthorpe Textiles Collection in 2020 – a research project that resulted in a podcast and a PDF booklet about the stories of makers in lockdown. GTC decided to produce a short print run as well, which was really special for all the contributors to have. That’s no longer available, but I still have the digital publication on my website – but somewhat buried so I should make it more accessible.

That brings me to Tangled, the most ambitious book I have created by myself. As with the others, it started as an exhibition catalogue intended for my 2019 Textile Traces exhibition at Llantarnam Grange. I didn’t it done in time so it became a lockdown project and again, I planned to get it printed and for sale within a few months. Of course other things got in the way, Textiles in Lockdown of course and then other projects and more pressing demands on my time, as well as the need to make a reliable income during the dark days of covid. Tangled, as it is now called, has been bubbling away for six years, waiting for me to have the space to finish it.

Tangled is available for pre-order now for £20 (will be £22)

I finished the writing back in December 2024 when I took a four-day writing retreat at Gladstone’s Library. I then didn’t get back to the final edit until May 2025 because I was already running two major projects and I just didn’t have any capacity for something that had no guarantee of money at the end of it. My 2nd self-published book had to be completed before the one I had already written could get back to the top of my to-do list. Lost Threads, Mary Linwood’s Legacy was published alongside the exhibition I created for Leicester Museum & Art Gallery in September 2025. This is a beautiful little book, with about 70% Mary Linwood’s work and about 30% my own. 

That brings me to 2026 and the closure of Mary Linwood exhibition in February and suddenly I had no more excuses to keep putting this book off. I worked solidly for a week or so to revise the text yet again and do all the prep required to get this to my lovely designer. We started with the cover design, which I was stalling on for a good few weeks while I agonised over the title (about which I will share more another time) and then the right image to use. I am, unsurprisingly, a very visual person and when thinking about how I want a book to look, I start playing with designs, fonts and trying the possible titles with interesting images. In the end I chose one of the images from my Embedded photoshoot last year, which I absolutely love and knew I wanted to use for something special. These are a few of the 25 different images I tried out.

Another stage in the preparation was to create a very rough mock up of the book text with images in to see how many pages it might need to be. With 18,000 words and around 100 artworks, I knew it needed to be a big book. I had already taken out huge chunks (which I want to publish elsewhere) but it still came out as a solid 150 pages.

With Lost Threads, I went round and round with the printers trying to work out if I could do a bigger publication (That is A5, around 60 pages), a more premium print quality, a different shape or format but in the end, I had to go with the most economical format, including giving up on recycled paper. That experience meant that I was better informed this time around and also more braced for the massive print cost increases since I printed Criminal Quilts. It’s a very big investment to produce Tangled, which is why I am pre-selling copies at a small discount now.

At the time of writing, the designer is wrestling it into shape and I need to make final image choices. Then we’ll get on to filling gaps and editing text to make it work more effectively on the page, and finally, hopefully, not too much proof reading and checking for the final version.

With a self-published book, the marketing and sales are my job too so there’s as much of that as there is writing, particularly at the moment. The pre-sale launch has coincided with, or been propelled by a new online shop built into my website. I am fortunate that my freelance colleague Meghan Hutchins has done most of the incredibly challenging admin on getting that set up – I would have given up long ago. Having sold self-published books for eight years now, I know that I need a foolproof system so I don’t miss any orders when it comes to sending them all out on publication. I also need to clear a lot more space in my house / studio to store all the books when they arrive! Being the warehouse as well as the creative workshop is always a challenge, when, like me, you have a lot of other stuff already!

Before the actual printed copies arrive, I need to plan the in-person launch in mid August and get on with marketing that event too. I am planning to make this a celebration and a mini exhibition too, and I have hired the beautiful community garden where I was artist in residence in 2023-4 to host this in. I’m also planning at least six months of pretty intensive promotion and marketing, as well as a longer-term strategy for keeping sales moving over the next year or two.

Self-publishing is a massive time and money investment and a huge risk, but it’s worked well for me in the past so I am being bold, brave and doing all I can to make it a success. Pre-ordering this book before publication is incredibly helpful and I appreciate all the support my readers are able to give. 

Tangled will be self-published in August 2026. Leicestershire locals please also look out for the in-person launch event on Saturday 15th August. 

This post is also on Substack, if you want to read my writing about textiles (and about writing) then please also subscribe there. Please also join my mailing list to hear more about the book, the launch and other things coming soon too.