Serendipity

These two very different pieces of old textiles have fallen next to each other on my desk today. My work is often guided by this type of serendipity. Hopefully I will be able to combine into something more resolved when I get back from France

Green Piece

In the suitcase for my french teaching trip next week!

Below the Radar

Some nice images and promotion of this beautiful book on the Selvedge blog HERE

Pages

A bundle of stuff gathered to make a book cover and the pages have already been collaged . I have used an antique French towel for the pages and the collages are patchworker together from little pieces of unpicked quilts. It will be finished in France in front of my students on the Chateau Dumas summer school. Hope to find some other french towels over there to make a few more pages.

Summer loving

A new little Textile Collage which will be coming to Chateau Dumas with me in a couple of weeks. Light and summery…..

Pink Flowers

 I have written a piece for TextileArtist.org about  exactly how I made this piece  including what inspired the work, the research phase, how and why I selected specific materials, the equipment I used and the stage-by-stage process of actually creating the piece. read about it HERE

Many of you ask me for online tutorials and this is the closest it will get I am afraid!

All shall be well

 I was educated at a convent school in Norwich so could not help but be aware of Julian on Norwich  whose cell was only a stone throw from my school. Her script Revelations of Divine Love was a truly revolutionary text and there was no wonder she was reclaimed by feminists as her life and writings acknowledge women's place in the world. There was a really interesting documentary about her life on BBC4 the other night. Little is known of her but it followed the story of the remarkable body of women throughout the centuries who protected her manuscript and writings which were considered heretical.why am I putting it on my textile blog? There is a truly remarkable moment when the story is told of the English Benedictine nuns who escaped France wearing the clothes of their Carmelite sisters who had been guillotined. The reliquary of the Carmelite martyrs is rarely/ never seen and is in the safe keeping of the nuns of Stanbrook in Yorkshire and there is a spine tingling moment when the case of the reliquary is opened and there are those very clothes. Those of you who know that old fabric tells a story will feel the same as me and wish you had been there at that very moment. . Watch it HERE on the i-player in the UK for another 26 days.