The American Kumihimo Society is honored to award
Jacqui Carey the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award. 

While attending a foundation course at Winchester School of Art, Jacqui Carey discovered that weaving combined her love of mathematics and art.  She started out as a weaver and lace maker. Early in her career as a lace maker she painted lace bobbins.

Jacqui earned a degree in Textiles at West Surrey College of Art and Design in 1985. There she studied a whole range of related subjects, including braidmaking. But it was working with complex weave structures that enabled Jacqui to start unravelling the mysteries of Kumihimo, Japanese braiding.

Although her work stems from the traditional, it is the creative possibilities of Kumihimo that inspire most of her braids. When she started teaching, Jacqui realized that there was a lack of written materials on kumihimo. As a result, she wrote books to fill that void.  Her first book, Creative Kumihimo is still used by many braid makers as their pattern bible.

For more than 40 years, innovative concepts, such as those found in Creative Kumihimo, Beads & Braids and The Book of Braids, illustrate how she has pushed the boundaries beyond the traditional, inspiring new ideas that are now widely used within the braiding community.

Jacqui has always felt that her analysis of traditional and historic practice provides the nourishing roots for her creative work, connecting her to the past and present world. Over the years she has built up a body of research including work that sheds new light on the historic Japanese braiding technique kute-uchi. This information has been documented in books such as Samurai Redressed, Chinese Braid Embroidery. Sweet Bags and Elizabethan Stitches.

In the early 1990s, Jacqui helped to establish The Braid Society and subsequently served on the committee. She organized their first exhibition entitled Samurai Undressed, based on her research into the development of Kumihimo and its relationship with the Samurai. She has gone on to curate a number of other exhibitions.

In 2005, Jacqui was awarded the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship to help further her study; in 2008 she was awarded a distinction for her M.A. in the History of Textile & Dress, at the Textile Conservation Centre, University of Southampton. She is renowned for her work as a braidmaker and for her analysis of historic textiles and continues to carry out much research in museum collections and reconstructed examples using obsolete techniques, notably within the field of early English embroidery.

Jacqui’s enthusiasm and willingness to share her knowledge led her to start teaching and lecturing in the 1980s. She is passionate about passing on her tacit skills, and have taught a variety of workshops for all ages, abilities and aims.  Jacqui has inspired many students over the years with her knowledge and enthusiasm.

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Excerpts from https://www.careycompany.com/jacqui-carey/