This is definitely not your grandmother’s embroidery. It’s stitched into the helmets of soldiers, onto car doors and fences, producing cats that pop out of shirt pockets and portraits so painterly, it’s hard to believe they’re made of thread. In fact, needlework stands in for everything from spray-painted street art to living moss in these extraordinarily artistic stitch-based creations.

Floral Cross-Stitch Urban Murals by Raquel Rodrigo

Cross-stitched street art is in bloom all over Madrid this week thanks to floral creations by artist Raquel Rodrigo, who wraps thick string around a wire mesh form and then affixes it to urban surfaces.

Cross-Stitched Microbes by Alicia Watkins

Rather than flowers and the other pretty things that are typically stitched within an embroidery hoop, artist Alicia Watkins puts the spotlight on nasty germs and microbes ranging from the measles to mad cow disease.

Pets in Pockets by Hiroko Kubota

Adorable, strikingly realistic cats and puppies pop out of pockets in this fun clothing line by Hiroko Kubota called Go!Go!5. The project started when the Japanese embroidery artist’s son asked for a custom cat-adorned shirt, and took off from there. You can even have a custom pet portrait created just for you.

Embroidery Gone Wild by Danielle Clough

Virtually anything that can be punctured or woven with embroidery floss is fair game for Danielle Clough, whose wildly unique creations have appeared on tennis rackets, shoes and fences.

Splotchy Embroidered Fashion by Olya Glagoleva and Lisa Smirnov

What appears, from a distance, to be splotches of paint roughly applied to textured textiles turns out to be hyper-detailed embroidery in abstract forms. Russian artist Lisa Smirnova paired up with fashion designer Olya Glagoleva to collaborate on this fun project for the eco-friendly clothing line GO!

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In Stitches 45 Artistic Embroidered Cross Stitched Creations

“My nose isn’t that big!” protests portrait subject George Wurtzel as he runs his hands over his own image, rendered in paint on thousands of screws raised from a wooden board in a relief pattern. He might not be able to see the colors, or the play of light and shadow that gives the portrait much of its nuance and realism, but he can still experience it in a way that wouldn’t be possible if it were merely painted onto a canvas. For artist Andrew Myers, who specializes in these unusual sculptural paintings, this moment marks a concept that has come full circle since he first watched another blind man eagerly explore his art with his fingertips, six years ago.

Myers doesn’t just allow people viewing his artwork to touch it, he actively encourages it, noting that it’s an important part of the experience of taking it in. Realizing that this could potentially allow a blind person to see their own portrait, he set out to create a custom work with artisan and teacher George Wurtzel as his subject. George teaches at a 300-acre summer camp for the visually impaired in California’s Redwood Forest, and has also been tasked with renovating a barn into a new Tactile Art Center full of accessible art, where blind artisans can both sell their own work and feel the 3D works of others.

“We snuck into George’s future gallery and  hung the portrait for him to discover,” says Andrew. “As he experienced this for the first time (and between bursts of laughter) he kept repeating the phrase, ‘mind boggling.’ Not every piece of art needs to or should be touched… but perhaps it’s time we took a look at how pervasive and mandatory our ‘no touching’ rules really are – it might help everyone see artwork a little differently.”

While Andrew’s portrait of George is comprised of about 4,000 screws, other works require upwards of 20,000. One portrait, ‘Fading Thoughts,’ takes his work a step further by infusing a scene with a sense of motion, with screws seemingly being blown off the canvas.

Eighty-two feet under the surface of the earth, hidden within the cellars of the Maison Ackerman winery in Saumur, France, an eerie blue-violet wonderland blooms in carefully constructed arrangements of UV-coated string. Artist Julien Salaud wound 28 miles of cotton thread around 65,000 nails for his installation Fleuve Céleste, which explores themes of nature, mysticism and shamanism against the natural rock walls of the space.

At first glance, the images seem as if they were created on a computer. But anyone who takes a tour of the winery can walk within tunnels of the glowing string, illuminated by a projected ultraviolet light.

According to Salaud, the work offers “a different viewpoint of what an animal can be: that of the Cartesian or the geneticist, of the predator or the prey, of the sorcerer or the mystic.” Conceived specifically for this unusual space, the work will be on display for three years and is the first exhibition originating from the Ackerman + Fontrevaud La Scéne residency.

Most people use nails just to hang art on the wall, but Maine-based sculptor John Bisbee collects thousands of them to craft incredibly intricate sculptures into spiked balls, undulating waves, tree-like structures and towering geometric stacks.

Bisbee got the idea after entering an abandoned house looking for found objects to use in his art, and finding a bucket full of old nails. “I kicked the bucket and it flipped over,” he told NPR, “and the nails had cohered, oxidized – they’d rusted into the bucket shape. And it was just such an obvious thing of beauty – it was so clearly above anything I had ever envisioned making myself. And I sat down on the bed, and I knew that I needed to get some nails.”

Since then, Bisbee has created dozens of sculptures using nothing but nails in a free-flowing process that the artist improvises, getting them “into my hands and out into space.”

It was only recently, after spending years welding and bending the nails into shapes, that Bisbee realized there’s something really obvious he can do with them as well: hit them with a hammer. From this revelation has come lots of wall-based art made with a pneumatic power hammer.

This skull is a three-dimensional object that you can hold in your hand, not an image that has been stretched and distorted in Photoshop. It’s one of many visually confusing sculptures by Robert Lazzarini, created in his Brooklyn studio after hours upon hours of research. Lazzarini often smashes objects to see how they change and fall apart before he goes about the process of distorting them with computer modeling and fabricating them anew.

Using bone dust to create his skulls, wood and steel to produce hammers and other materials that are appropriate for recreating the originals, Lazzarini painstakingly crafts each item in an altered form. Previously working with more free-form alterations manually, he now sticks to math for the most accurate results possible, with every detail in scale.

“In terms of subject matter, it’s representational, so people think it’s a type of Pop art,” Lazzarini told Blouin Art Info. “In some ways it is, but I think it really hinges more profoundly on the aftermath of Minimalism… One of the main problems of sculpture for me is its static nature. This kind of animation” [when the object changes as you walk around it] “for lack of a better word, gives the sensation that there’s activity where there really isn’t. It relates back to corporeally navigating something to understand it.”