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 has provided buttons, ribbons and braid for an award-winning project at Perth Museum, and hundreds of buttons for the films “Napoleon” & “Sweeney Todd”. She has created buttons & trimmings for various series including “The Crown”, “Becoming Elizabeth” , “A Stitch in Time” as well as a few films yet to be released!
She is the author of a number of books including Buttons, A Passementerie Workshop Manual, Dorset Ring Buttons, Thread Wrapped 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.
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Previous clients include: Henry Poole & Co, Hawthorne & Heaney, SDTA Productions Ltd, Ninya Mikhaila Historical Costumier, The Tudor Tailor, Gabriele Mendela (Costumier), Prior Attire(Costumier), Angels Costumes, Brouhaha Lee Ltd, Dover Castle, Luton Museum, Dombey Street Productions (Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd), Noseley Hall, The Globe Theatre, The Victoria & Albert Museum, The Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, Perth Museum & Art Gallery, The Royal Armoury, The Royal Mews, Suzi Clarke (Costumier), Gary Smedley, Harman Hay, Harriet Waterhouse (Costumier), Chimera Costumes and numerous private individuals.