Jane Nicholas is one of the world's leading embroiderers, specializing in stumpwork. Her exquisite embroideries in goldwork and stumpwork are inspired by Japanese family crests, a subject that has fascinated her for many years. In this book, Jane has selected 12 designs and interpreted them in a variety of ways using combinations of goldwork, and raised and surface stitching. The projects feature a charming array of motifs including butterflies and other insects, Japanese plants and flowers. Measuring just 10cm (4in) square, each is worked on an assortment of silk Japanese kimono fabrics, and is accompanied by detailed instructions, a stitch diagram and the outline for the design. At the start of the book there is a fascinating history of Japanese family crests, followed by a stitch directory and a techniques section covering how to prepare your background fabric, how to transfer the design and how to work with wire. Illustrated throughout with sumptuous photography and informative diagrams, this is a treasure trove of ideas and inspiration for embroiderers and lovers of Japanese culture alike.

In this new collection, contributors from a variety of disciplines provide a critical context for the relationship between feminist pedagogy and academic feminism by exploring the complex ways that critical perspectives can be brought into the classroom. This book discusses the processes employed to engage learners by challenging them to ask tough questions and craft complex answers, wrestle with timely problems and posit innovative solutions, and grapple with ethical dilemmas for which they seek just resolutions. Diverse experiences, interests, and perspectives - together with the various teaching and learning styles that participants bring to twenty-first-century universities - necessitate inventive and evolving pedagogical approaches, and these are explored from a critical perspective. The contributors collectively consider the implications of the theory/practice divide, which remains central within academic feminism's role as both a site of social and gender justice and as a part of the academy, and map out some of the ways in which academic feminism is located within the academy today.

In this wonderful book Jane shares her methods of using beautiful threads and fabrics - and beetle wings - to create beautiful designs and projects in many forms of embroidery. Some are simplicity itself - an elegant beetle shape embroidered in glittering metallic threads to reflect the iridescent colours of the wing cases set in a paperweight, for example. Others are delightful floral pictures in which a glittering stumpwork beetle plays a starring part. Lavishly illustrated in colour, this book with detailed step-by-step instructions accompanied by numerous explanatory diagrams is a fascinating addition to the working bookshelf of anyone interested in dimensional and textured embroidery.

Originating in the 17th century, stumpwork embroidery creates beautiful raised designs with satin backgrounds, padding, and motifs often embellished with beads. Designer and author Jane Nicholas details 19 projects containing 28 motifs of field flowers, pansies, wildlife, and other features applied to apparel and household decorations. Includes hundreds of illustrations and photos.

With her short skirt, bobbed hair, and penchant for smoking, drinking, dancing, and jazz, the "Modern Girl" was a fixture of 1920s Canadian consumer culture. She appeared in art, film, fashion, and advertising, as well as on the streets of towns from coast to coast. In The Modern Girl, Jane Nicholas argues that this feminine image was central to the creation of what it meant to be modern and female in Canada.

Using a wide range of visual and textual evidence, Nicholas illuminates both the frequent public debates about female appearance and the realities of feminine self-presentation. She argues that women played an active and thoughtful role in their embrace of modern consumer culture, even when it was at the risk of serious social, economic, and cultural penalties. The first book to fully examine the "Modern Girl"'s place in Canadian culture, The Modern Girl will be essential reading for all those interested in the history of gender, sexuality, and the body in the modern world.

From fur coats to nude paintings, and from sports to beauty contests, the body has been central to the literal and figurative fashioning of ourselves as individuals and as a nation. In this first collection on the history of the body in Canada, an interdisciplinary group of scholars explores the multiple ways the body has served as a site of contestation in Canadian history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Showcasing a variety of methodological approaches, Contesting Bodies and Nation in Canadian History includes essays on many themes that engage with the larger historical relationship between the body and nation: medicine and health, fashion and consumer culture, citizenship and work, and more. The contributors reflect on the intersections of bodies with the concept of nationhood, as well as how understandings of the body are historically contingent. The volume is capped off with a critical introductory chapter by the editors on the history of bodies and the development of the body as a category of analysis.

In 1973, a five year old girl known as Pookie was exhibited as "The Monkey Girl" at the Canadian National Exhibition. Pookie was the last of a number of children exhibited as 'freaks' in twentieth-century Canada. Jane Nicholas takes us on a search for answers about how and why the freak show persisted into the 1970s. In Canadian Carnival Freaks and the Extraordinary Body, 1900-1970s, Nicholas offers a sophisticated analysis of the place of the freak show in twentieth-century culture. Freak shows survived and thrived because of their flexible business model, government support, and by mobilizing cultural and medical ideas of the body and normalcy. This book is the first full length study of the freak show in Canada and is a significant contribution to our understanding of the history of Canadian popular culture, attitudes toward children, and the social construction of able-bodiness. Based on an impressive research foundation, the book will be of particular interest to anyone interested in the history of disability, the history of childhood, and the history of consumer culture.