Margaret Timbrell is a San Francisco-based textile artist whose work uses needlework to examine contemporary life. Drawing from urban landscapes, digital culture, and everyday experience, she explores how people adapt to changing environments and systems.

Urban Tapestries is an ongoing series that uses California's urban birds to explore adaptation, survival, and our shared environment.

Originally performed at the StARTup Art Fair in San Francisco in 2025, this expansion transforms the Selfie Wall into an immersive space, inviting attendees to walk through layers of fabric, symbolizing the finding of identity and digital misinterpretation.

Entropy & Change uses Silicon Valley billboard ad campaign colorways to depict the classic California landscape and the urban wild life in action.

For the If Only series I source job titles from Linkedin and pair them with vintage needlepoint figures and birds.

In the middle ages the Unicorn was universally believed to exist. This made me wonder, what in contemporary times do we believe that is not real?

During San Francisco’s shelter in place I developed a body of work titled “Quarantined Tigers” where I needlepointed the observations of my 4 year old twins onto vintage tiger imagery.

In 2019 I was very fortunate to be commissioned to create a 9’x15′ latch hook rug portrait of Minnie Pearl for the brand new Graduate Hotel in Nashville.

This series is an extremely revealing and intimate journal of my life over a year long period of time.

Amy and I discovered we both had odd comments in our respective guest books from 20 years ago. We decided we’d collaborate, sharing some of our phrases, while both using floral imagery.

The Selfie Wall is both literally a selfie wall and a performance piece that occurs in social media. It is a way to reclaim the identities that have been stripped by the autocorrect application: a ubiquitous program that exhibits a bias against nontraditional/non-Anglo Saxon names.

The Redwork Series documents sometimes mundane details of my life as a parent.

This is Autocorrect Fails: a text based embroidery series that addresses the odd bias and culture of technology and social engagement.

My father was a vexillologist (flag collector). It interests me how flag design is steeped in metaphor and symbolism.

Needlepoint is a sister to both embroidery and cross stitch but the difference is that you cover the entirety of your canvas with your stitches. It is for that reason that needlepoint is very slow.