Travels with Textiles July 2024

Hampton Court Palace – just outside London – is famous for once being one of Henry the Eighth's favourite palaces. This is where he played tennis and courted some of his wives and, unsurprisingly, it is still rumoured to have several ghosts. Today they share the palace with one of the great institutions of the stitching world. The Royal School of Needlework is based at the palace, it has a professional studio, where it creates ceremonial garments for events like the coronations of Kings and Queens, it trains new generations of teachers and professional embroiderers. It also collects stitches in a unique stitchbank,  runs summer schools and year-round courses, and it has a collection of over ten thousand pieces of needlework and embroidery.   Join us this month as we take our microphones to the Palace to talk to the Royal School of Needlework's Curator, Isabella Rosner, who has the mammoth job of looking after the entire collection. She is an art historian who has studied material culture from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, and she is, of course, the host of her own podcast, called Sew What.