About Brown Paper Bag

Brown Paper Bag celebrates embroidery and illustration, often rejoicing when the two meet. (But existing separately is totally cool too.) 

Brown Paper Bag chron­i­cles illus­trat­ed images, tex­tile art,  cre­ative prod­ucts, and beyond; they are all impor­tant parts of our visu­al cul­ture and deserve their time to shine.

Brown Paper Bag is run by me, Sara Barnes. I’m an MFA in Illus­tra­tion Prac­tice alum (2013) and a free­lance illustrator/embroiderer and staff edi­tor at My Mod­ern Met. I wrote a book about embroi­dery artist Sarah K. Ben­ning that was pub­lished by Chron­i­cle Books in Sep­tem­ber 2019.

I’ve con­tributed to Com­put­er Arts mag­a­zine, eBay, and books about illus­tra­tion. I’ve been fea­tured in Embroi­dery Mag­a­zine, Bmore­Art Jour­nal of Art + Ideas, Upper­case Mag­a­zine, and more.

Dis­claimer: Brown Paper Bag con­tains affil­i­ate links on some items fea­tured. This means that if you click through and buy via that spe­cial link, I make a lit­tle mon­ey from the sale. Please note that my choic­es in prod­ucts aren’t dic­tat­ed by these links. Click here for more infor­ma­tion.

Take note: All images are sub­ject to copy­right by their respec­tive own­ers. I do my very best to attribute the cor­rect names to images and works. If you find an error, please let me know! And, when shar­ing artists’ work, please keep/add the name of the per­son who cre­at­ed the piece!