My Bed Book

My newest children’s picture book, My Bed, Enchanting Ways to Fall Asleep around the World was published in 2020. It took about 2 years to hand stitch all of the illustrations and I’m excited that you can now see the fruits of my labor! Reviews like these are pouring in –
“(My Bed) is just stunning, calming and healing”, “ingeniously illustrated” and “I am overwhelmed by the beauty and all the little details of each page.”

Autographed copies of MY BED are available in my shop here.

See how Salley Mavor made the illustrations for her new picture book MY BED.

A Japanese translation of MY BED, published by Fukuinkan Shoten is now available in Japan.

A touring exhibition of the original embroidered bas-relief artwork that is photographed and reproduced in the book is now underway. Salley Mavor: Bedtime Stitches is traveling around the country for a few years, with bookings through 2024. More information about the exhibition, including a current schedule is at the end of this post.

For a while now, I’ve shared the process of making the 3-dimensional bas-relief  illustrations, which involve stitching, embroidery and other embellishment techniques. Posts I’ve written about each page are listed here:

Rebecca Bond wrote a poem that celebrates our diversity, while also bringing us together through the universal theme of children sleeping safe in their beds. As the illustrator, it was my task to bring these children to life and create their varying environments.

I am happy to announce a touring exhibition of original artwork for the book: SALLEY MAVOR: Bedtime Stories. This is an opportunity for the public to see up close the fine detail and 3-dimensional quality of my bas-relief sculptural embroideries. The exhibition is modeled after the successful national touring exhibition of the artwork for my book, Pocketful of Posies. It is currently booked through 2024 with the possibility of being extended into 2025. Interested museums are welcome to contact me (Salley at weefolkstudio.com) for information about hosting the exhibit.

SALLEY MAVOR: BEDTIME STITCHES

What’s being said about the exhibition:
“Bedtime Stitches Provides Cozy Respite From a Tumultuous Year”
The Falmouth Enterprise
——————————————————————-
“The genius of Salley Mavor’s meticulously realized imaginative worlds is just what we need right now.”
Artscope Magazine

TOURING EXHIBITION
Beginning in September 2020
Sept. 11 – Dec. 19, 2020, Cahoon Museum, Cotuit, MA.
Feb. 28 – May 30, 2021, Cedarhurst Center for the Arts, Mount Vernon, IL
Sept. 14 – Dec. 31, 2021, New England Quilt Museum, Lowell, MA
Jan. 25 – April 10, 2022, International Quilt Museum, Lincoln, NE
June 7 – Sept. 11, 2022,  Brick Store Museum, Kennebunk, ME, Bedtime Stitches will be included in the retrospective exhibition, What a Relief: The Art of Salley Mavor
Oct. 15 – Dec. 31, 2022, Historical and Cultural Center of Clay County, Moorhead, MN
Feb. 1 – Apr. 30, 2023, Pacific Northwest Quilt & Fiber Arts Museum, La Conner, WA
June – mid-Sept. 2023 Southeastern Quilt and Textile Museum, Carrollton, Georgia
Sept. 30, 2023 – January 7, 2024, Southern Vermont Arts Center, Manchester, VT. Bedtime Stitches and Social Fabric will be displayed together.
Jan. 20. – May 5, 2024, Upcountry History Museum, Greenville, SC
July — Dec. 2024, Albany Institute of History and Art, Albany, NY, Bedtime Stitches and Social Fabric will be displayed together.

Visitors to the exhibition, as well as those of you at home with a copy of My Bed, can hunt for details in the artwork using the downloadable sheet below.

Throughout the book, there are spot illustrations of animals on text panels. To see how they were made, click here.

To keep up with new posts, please subscribe to this blog (top right column on the home page). Your contact info will not be sold or shared. If you’d like to see more frequent photos tracking the projects in my studio, please follow me on Facebook and/or Instagram

Recent Posts

Harvest Time – part 4 (embroidered plants)

In Part 4 in the series about making Harvest Time, I share photos and commentary about embroidering plants to fill in around the 3-D felt leaves shown in Part 3. When planning out this piece, I wanted to come up with a way to separate the above ground front yard from the underground cutaway portion. I ended up embellishing gardens on pieces of felt that overlap the soil, roots, and stones below.

Harvest Time is the fall scene in a series of seasonal landscapes that capture the wonder and magic of the natural world, both real and imagined. Note cards and jigsaw puzzles of the this and other scenes in the series (Frosty Morning and Mossy Glen) are available in my Shop.

Harvest Time Jigsaw Puzzle

I use a combination of flat embroidery and 3-D forms in my artwork because I think it’s more dynamic and eye catching that way. I also like the process of doing both, so I mix it up to keep myself interested.

This part of the process was more free form and reminded me of the simple embroidered foliage I made in the illustrations for Hey, Diddle, Diddle.

Hey, Diddle, Diddle! board book, 2005

To stabilize the floppy pieces of felt, I stitched and wrapped wire along the outside edges and then embroidered blades of grass.

Then I doodled stems with chain stitches and added French knot seeds.

This kind of work is portable, so I carried around all of the parts and supplies wherever I went…

…and did most of the stitching in front of the wood stove.

The orange and red leaves are chain stitched with DMC flower thread, which unfortunately has been discontinued. It’s thicker and not as shiny as regular embroidery floss and has a sturdy feel that I find satisfying. I treasure my supply of flower thread and have enough to last my lifetime.

Glass beads make great berries.

I glued a piece of driftwood to the top of one section to make a perch for a wee folk forager to sit on. Doesn’t the whole thing look like a shoe!

I also created a mossy patch of front lawn to go just below the doorway with hundreds, if not thousands of French knots.

I padded the back of the embellished pieces with layers of thick felt so that they would stick out and float above the cutaway underground portion, which I’ll get to later in the series.

In future posts, I will focus on different aspects of making Harvest Time, including the toad stool mushroom, wee folk figures, storage containers, needle felted tunnels and cold cellars, roots, and stones.

The overview introduces the series.
Part 1 features moss making.
Part 2 is about making the turkey tail mushroom.
Part 3 shows the construction of felt leaves.

To keep up with new posts, please subscribe to this blog (top right column on the home page). Your contact info will not be sold or shared. If you’d like to see more frequent photos tracking the projects in my studio, please follow me on Facebook and/or Instagram

  1. What’s NEW in my shop? Leave a reply
  2. Baby Banner for Elias 23 Replies
  3. Bedtime Stitches in Pacific Northwest 7 Replies
  4. Adaptive Sled for the snow scene 8 Replies
  5. Boston Children’s Hospital Installation 27 Replies
  6. Vintage Valentine 1 Reply
  7. Harvest Time – part 3 (felt leaves) 6 Replies
  8. looking back at 2022 16 Replies
  9. Holiday cards and more 7 Replies