Gina-B Silkworks

Gina-B Silkworks designs and produces a variety of craft kits, books, DVDs and other items with an emphasis on handwork & passementerie - decorative textile crafts. We also stock a range of tools & materials for these crafts. Gina also makes bespoke items to commission.

"Traditional Crafts for the modern maker"

About Gina -

Gina Barrett has been making reconstructions of buttons, dress trimmings and other passementerie for museums and costumiers since 1999. Her work can be seen in a variety of museums, heritage sites & stately homes including the Royal Mews, the Royal Armouries, Historic Royal Palaces, The Victoria & Albert Museum, English Heritage, Chicago Museum of Art and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. 

She provided buttons, ribbons and braid for an award-winning project at Perth Museum, and hundreds of buttons for the film “Sweeney Todd”. Her latest film work includes buttons for "Napoleon" and "Lee". She has created buttons & trimmings for various series including “The Crown”, “Becoming Elizabeth” , “A Stitch in Time”.

She is the author of a number of books including Buttons, A Passementerie Workshop Manual, Dorset Ring Buttons, Thread Wrapped Buttons, Zwirnknopf Buttons and the Making Passementerie range of instructional DVDs. She appears on the Create & Craft channel with demonstrations of passementerie techniques, representing her company Gina-B Silkworks. Gina is the contributor for the Passementerie entry in the Encyclopaedia of Medieval Dress and Textiles of the British Isles c. 450-1450 (Brill). She has also co-authored Tak V Bowes Departed: A 15th Century Braiding Manual Examined and 6 booklets on medieval narrow wares, and regularly produces how-to articles for magazines, as well as papers and essays on other forms of passementerie.

Gina has been involved in textile research projects with groups around the world, and is a founder member of Soper Lane, a group begun in 1999 to research the lives and work of the medieval London silkwomen. 

Gina is a trained illustrator, with a background in historical and diagram illustration and graphic design. Her passion for textiles grew from studying historical costume for her illustrative work.