Blog

Fashion History + Gore: Macabre Beauty in Corsetry, Hearts & Classic Film

There’s a reason we can’t stop staring at old Hollywood glamour: it’s beautiful, but it’s also a little gruesome. Behind every silk gown, behind every cinched waist and red-carpet smile, there are bruises—sometimes literal, sometimes emotional. Classic film icons, especially women, wore pain the way couture houses demanded they wear satin. This is the place where fashion history meets gore, where beauty and blood share a seam. As a fiber artist obsessed with vintage fashion and classic cinema, I stitch

jmstrano January 2, 2026 8:00 am

❄️🖤 Witchy Winter Stitching Rituals: Creative Hibernation for the Fiber Artist

When the cold arrives, some artists speed up to meet holiday deadlines. I don’t.I slow down.I go inward, like a creature burrowing underground—hoarding ideas the way a raven collects shiny bones. Winter is when my embroidery becomes ritual. Not hobby, not hustle—ritual. Thread replaces incense. Fabric becomes altar. Silence becomes spellwork. As a fiber artist, I treat winter the way witches treat the dark moon: a time for replenishing power, letting inspiration gestate, and protecting energy from the outside world.

jmstrano December 19, 2025 8:10 am

Custom Embroidery Art: I Embroider Memories That Haunt Us

Custom Fiber Art by Jacqueline Strano Some people frame photos.I stitch the ones that won’t let go. As a custom fiber artist, I create one-of-a-kind embroidered portraits and mixed-media textile pieces based on personal photographs, family history, vintage imagery, and secret stories. My custom embroidery art doesn’t decorate a wall—it resurrects what’s been forgotten. I use thread the way others use paint, but my process isn’t sentimental. I treat personal memory as raw material, blending vintage photos, anatomical illustrations, corset

jmstrano December 5, 2025 3:57 pm

Why I Love to Embroider the Heart: A Story of Stitching, Memory & Women’s Resilience

The heart appears again and again in my work—floating outside the body, stitched back into it, glowing with red thread, beating between women who hold machetes, or blooming from the chest of a young woman in an archival photograph. Many people ask why I embroider the heart so often. The answer lives somewhere between anatomy, emotion, and collective memory. For me, the embroidered heart is a symbol of what survives. It is the organ of truth-telling, the container of grief

jmstrano November 18, 2025 6:40 pm

Stitching the Unmade Body: My Frankenstein-Inspired Embroidery & the Art of Reassembly

Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming Frankenstein has reignited a conversation that has always lived quietly in my work: what does it mean to stitch a body back together? What does it mean to rebuild the self from scraps—memory, trauma, tenderness, and the stories we inherit? Frankenstein’s creature is not simply a monster; he is a being assembled from the remnants of others. And in many ways, so are the women in the historic photographs I embroider. The stitched heart, the exposed arteries, the layered threads—they all

jmstrano November 16, 2025 11:43 pm