Ever wondered what to do with your left over bits of wallpaper? Look no further than talented British seamstress Claire Coles. She creates a wide range of pieces doing just that…from greetings cards, bespoke pieces and jewellery,  to contracts with the likes of Missoni and Perrier-Jouet, Coles is carving a real specialist niche for herself. Her style is instantly recognisable.

Claire lays the different wallpapers down and stitches them in to place. What I particularly like is the looseness of her stitching – it would be easy to get sucked in to doing everything super neat, but there is something really liberating in the fact that she does not do that.

I love the image above – as I have said before I do like a piece that includes birds and this one really appeals to me. I love the background – the fact that it is monochrome and includes script with the image overlaid I think is beautiful. The birds look as though they are ready to take flight.

Nobody stitches a face quite like Claire Coles – this is a surprisingly difficult thing to achieve, but Claire achieves it with real aplomb!

These two images (above) show a couple of Coles’ bespoke commissions. These are generally applied directly to the wall of clients properties, so they become like a permanent work of art. Coles plays with scale to make the pieces more effective.

The nice thing about the work of this artist is that the pieces work on several different levels. The two images above are greetings cards, but would also work just as well if they were larger, wall art pieces.

Pretty, delicate, varied, clever…Coles’ work just keeps on reinventing itself. What a great idea this is, it will just run and run! It’s a good job there aren’t shoe trees by the way, as I can barely move at home for inadvertent shoe purchases as it is!!

To finish, I have chosen a few of my favourite pieces by Coles. I really love the kingfisher particularly, as it is one of my favourite birds. The shelf image I love as the quirky bottles look like items I have in my collection of random objects at home! The last image shows a few different images collated together, which for me, demonstrates the variety of images that Coles produces. Time for tea…