Tracey Emin Art Project

Tracey Emin's blanket artworks are an outlet for her emotions, her past and her thoughts. In this project, we will walk you step by step through the process in order to create a personal, expressive blanket of your own.

The first step is to create a plan of what you want it to involve. Emin's pieces include important places from her life, names of family and friends, her date of birth, her thoughts and memorable quotes. On paper, write down lists of all the information you wish to include on the blanket.

Once you have your information compiled, you need to collect material. You will need one large sheet or blanket and then an array of smaller pieces of material. Gather plain materials for writing on and then patterned, bright, interesting materials for the other elements. Try using materials that mean something to you, such as old clothes, bed linen, curtains – anything that you can say represents yourself. 

Cut one of your lighter materials into rectangles and write your chosen quotes and paragraphs on them using a fabric pen (available in craft shops). Write in your own handwriting in order to make it more personal.

The other elements of your blanket – the names, places and date of birth – are all shown on a larger scale. In order to produce these, cut the letters and numbers out of one pattern or colour and stitch them, with a needle and thread, onto squares of another.

Make each word different and pick contrasting colours for the letters and the panels they are sewn to so they will stand out.

Once all of your elements are ready, you can begin stitching them to your blanket. Start off by stitching some large panels of background colour in certain sections, then adding your hand-written patches.

Keep layering material and your larger letter panels until your blanket is complete.

Tracey Emin.