Fancy Work: Unpicking Past Lives

by Alice Hattrick

Blending biography, memoir and art criticism, Fancy Unpicking Past Lives explores the ever-shifting tensions between family, labour and gender through the history of embroidery, or ‘fancy work’. What can a scrap of embroidery tell us about how to live? How can the past help us imagine unconstrained lives when not all traces remain? To explore these questions, Alice Hattrick turns to the embroidery designer May Morris and her circle, including her father William Morris; her mother Jane, an artist’s model and embroiderer herself; and MF, May’s gender non-conforming partner of twenty years. Through this queer encounter with the Arts and Crafts movement, Hattrick shifts attention from dominant narratives of design towards intimacy, labour and domestic life. Looking to May – alongside others who have found in textiles a means of resistance – Hattrick traces connections between these histories and their own queer identity, family ties and precarious working conditions within an ableist society. Expansive in thought, form and time, Fancy Work together archival fragments, domestic spaces and ongoing sites of struggle, insisting on the political force of often overlooked acts of defiance.

Genres: Nonfiction, LGBT, Memoir

240 pages, Paperback

Expected publication October 27, 2026

About the author

Alice Hattrick is a writer based in London. Their recent work has been included in HEALTH: Documents of Contemporary Art, edited by Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz (Whitechapel/MIT, 2020) and Mine Searching Yours (Forma, 2020). Their essays, interviews and criticism have been published by The White Review, Frieze, Art Review and Rhizome among other publications, and included in events at institutions such as ICA London (‘On Cripping’), Raven Row (‘Sick Time is Resist Time’), the Barbican (New Suns Festival) and the Goldsmiths Centre of Feminist Research. Alice is also the co-producer of Access Docs for Artists, a resource for disabled and/or chronically ill artists, curators and writers, made in collaboration with artists Leah Clements and Lizzy Rose, for which they were named on The Innovator’s List for 2020 (Artnet Intelligence Report). Alice studied at the Royal College of Art and the Courtauld Institute of Art, and teaches criticism at the London College of Fashion.

Reviews

[Lizzy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like their other book, Ill Feelings, this is a meandering beautiful read. I’m not sure if I’m swayed by it also being a Fitzcarraldo edition but I’m not complaining. I can’t say a book on embroidery would have been my first choice, but I spent a lot of it googling famous and not so famous pieces and being stunned. As ever Hattrick brings in their personal experience of being queer and disabled and the importance of sewing in radical politics. It made me feel incredibly zen.

[Elena · Rating 5 out of 5]

awesome. this is the exact stuff I wanted to read about I’m so glad all this research and info exists and I just want to know even moreeeee. NEED to go to kelmscott and the red house and the v&a again!!! so excited to look at my big May book I brought home from London on a Ryanair flight when I get home!!!

[Anna carnegie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book Fancy Work by alice hattrick has been my companion the past few weeks. Such a gentle companion, like a wise old cat nudging me to move my hands or imagine more after reading.
Fancy work weaves through the embroidery designer May Morris’ world and life alongside the mysterious yet oh so bold MF. Falling into embroidery techniques to dyes and landscapes and relationships spanning makers both quiet and loud (gee’s bend to protest banners) - Hattrick for me, managed to tell a story of the necessity that is making. The quiet care patience and resistance, especially alongside illness, queerness or unconventional lives, that making creates is so profound yet entirely right for a world that values fast production and consumption over the slow and meaningful.
I feel i could go off track writing about reading this - as I did when reading, dive into holes of image searches and other incredible lives new to my attention! I could quote Hattrick’s writing endlessly, as i underlined so much!
Most of all - i highly recommend this, especially if you value the quiet lives whose work sings loudly when given a chance.

Go make a thing!!

[Amanda Rosso · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very impressive book, threading together so many different topics and issues, touching upon so many variations of the same motive. A bit uneven at times, but always truly enjoyable.

Hattrick's book belongs to the strand of Fitzcarraldo non-fiction in which biography, memoir and art criticism are made to share a single thread, and its intelligence lies in how openly it shows the knots. At its centre is May Morris, embroidery designer, daughter of William, overshadowed in the design histories that canonised her father, and the domestic constellation around her: Jane, artist's model and embroiderer in her own right, and MF, May's gender non-conforming companion of twenty years, whose surviving initials already measure how little the archive was willing to keep.

Hattrick reads these lives the way one reads a worn piece of crewelwork, turning it over to the reverse, attending to the labour the finished surface conceals and to the places where the thread has simply perished, so that the textile becomes a model for the archive itself: partial, ephemeral, handled to the point of damage, legible only through what has been lost.
The book's charge comes from Hattrick's refusal to treat the past as a site of safe contemplation. Their own queerness, their family, the precarity of intellectual work in a society that measures bodies by their productivity, are stitched into May's story without the sentimental equivalences that sink so much autotheoretical writing; the dead are asked for techniques, for ways of living sideways to the household as an institution, and Hattrick is scrupulous about how few answers they yield. "Fancy work", the faintly dismissive Victorian name for ornamental needlework, is turned against its own condescension and made to carry the full weight of labour, intimacy and small, stubborn acts of defiance, which is precisely where the Arts and Crafts movement's official story never thought to look.

[Patty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutley recomend. I found this book incredibly exciting and interesting.

Alice Hattrick shows a very special sensitivity, creativity, perseverance and will to first of all engage in such in depth research, and second, to be able to weave it all together in this book, that is also written so beautifully! Embroidery serves Hattrick as the feeld to discuss alternative narratives to dominant culture through the research of the figure of May (a 20th century feminine British figure important in the creative arts circle and involved in women’s rights movement) and their gender non conforming partner MF. Their live together Is resignified under the queer lense and superposed with history, social justice, queer & feminist political studies.

Thank you Alice for sharing this with the world! It has been a wonder ful read and it definitely has opened a huge window to me into textiles and needle work theory!

It makes me so happy books like this exist and that there are people out there with such curious minds!

Can’t wait to read all the books and essays that you cited for Fancy work.

[Ygraine]

v beautiful and useful elaboration on some ideas that i found interesting in many hands make a quilt, and even more material & ground entirely new to me. also feels like another conversation with a friend book, a little more like still life with oysters and lemon in that its pace is often deliciously slowed by the desire to stop and find pictures and get distracted by details.

[Annika · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this so so so much and will be getting it for my friends who sew/quilt/embroider!!!!

[Tass · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5. sounds like such a specific niche and yet this covers a humongous breadth of history, art/craftforms, geography, critical theory & lived experience. different sections continually resounding in my head & surfacing unexpectedly. chapter on work & people in psychiatric institutions especially poignant and vivid to me.

also just never knew any of this about may morris & MF. there have always been so many ways to live!