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“Crafting something with your own hands is a reflective process. It encourages you to slow down when the pace of life feels too fast.”
Katy Bevan started Quickthorn in 2022 because she saw a gap in the market for intelligent books about craft and making. By then she had spent more than twenty years in craft writing, teaching and publishing. She edited magazines, Ceramic Review among them, and books for Quarto, Quintet and Anness. At Crafts Council in London she was Participation and Learning Manager, running projects that got people of every age making with their hands, and for eight years she was a trustee of Heritage Crafts.
The list runs from the how-to to the argument. Celia Pym's On Mending and SOCKS, and Hikaru Noguchi's two darning books translated from the Japanese, teach the skill itself. Rachael Matthews' Rag Manifesto makes the case for cutting up old clothes, Lynn Setterington's Connecting Threads gathers stitched projects from 1981 to 2024, and Earth, Fire, Iron follows the artist blacksmith Alan Evans, whose gates for St Paul's Cathedral changed the craft. Katy co-wrote Intelligent Hands with Charlotte Abrahams, on why hand skills belong in schools and in working life.
Most books are laminated in plastic. Quickthorn's are left uncoated and Katy accepts that the covers will show their age sooner for it. Each title is printed in the UK in a carefully sized run rather than the long runs that end up pulped.
Katy is a maker as well as a publisher. She teaches darning, crochet and knitting and places such as West Dean College of Art and writes for Selvedge. Many of the Quickthorn titles are short, easy-to-hold books with bite-sized chapters and plenty of pictures, designed to be picked up in a spare ten minutes as readily as read cover to cover.
Printed in the UK only, on recycled paper wherever possible and FSC-certified paper otherwise, with local sourcing put first when the two pull apart. Covers are uncoated rather than covered in plastic, and the packaging is all recyclable.
3 pieces that have found their home
