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Louise Gardiner at Bristol Quilters
Last night were were exceptionally lucky to have Louise Gardiner, a professional embroiderer of twenty years standing, to talk to us. First of all she is a very engaging speaker, bursting with...
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War Collar Three: The Don’t Mess With Me Collar
This piece is another which has been looking for a home. I made the piece on a workshop at Heartspace Studios with Basil Kardasis in 2012. I’ve noted before that I love things that are really heavy...
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War Collar 4: The Blood Collar
This is the first collar I made. I started by thinking that the throat was a vulnerable part of the body with so much blood so near the surface and made the collar in blood red tones. As I have...
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The Femme Fatale Collar
The title of this one is pretty self-explanatory. I was in two minds whether to include a collar like this. The whole topic of sexuality at work is a tricky one. There is no doubt that some women...
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The Athena Collar
For some reason, the photographs on the blog are getter worse. I still can’t find my proper close-up camera for the details, and I like to use my camera phone so that the pictures will load quickly...
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The Buffer Collar
This collar started life as a plain velvet base like this one: The idea behind this one is to provide a collar to protect the vulnerable throat, which I have written about in previous blogs. I...
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The ‘Little Me?’ Collar
This collar in my War Collar Series is examining the popular feminine tactile that comes from believing that if you are sweet and demure enough the warrior men will protect you. This is nonesense, of...
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The ‘Don’t Take Any Wooden Nickels’ Collar
I made this collar because I wanted to say something about the need women have to look out for themselves, because despite Equal Pay acts they are often paid less than men doing equal work of equal...
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The Evil Eye Collar
This piece is based on a very common amulet. Amulets to ward off the Evil Eye are found all over the world, and the eyes are often blue, as seen on the cover of Desmond Morris’s book containing...
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Janet Clare Workshop
I was very lucky last week to go to Janet Clare’s talk at Bristol Quilters and then to her workshop the following day. The talk was about publishing her books, and came in a series of talks we have...
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On the joy of getting something right
Last week I had a particularly bad day at work. I went to a meeting where just about every behaviour I warn students about was on display. So, no-one (except idiotic me) was prepared to stand up to...
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Gillian Travis at Malvern Quilt Show
There was a lot of lovely work on show at Malvern, but the ones I liked the absolute best were Gillian Travis’ Indian quilts. I think this is probably because my own work is going through such a...
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Mr Finch
Finally, finally, finally my copy of Mr Finch’s book has arrived. I made a cup of good coffee and sat down to read it. That isn’t my hand, by the way, the picture is from his Facebook gallery. Mr...
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Modern medals
A couple of years ago my mother gave me a book she had bought because it was so beautifully produced, but which turned out to be totally useless. It’s called ‘French General Treasured Notions:...
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Latest Laura Ashley panel
I have started doing some work with Laura Ashley fabric again. This time there is no rush. It’s not for an exhibition or a conference paper, so I can take as long as I like. It started with one of...
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New Year’s Doll 2015
Every year on New Year’s Day I make a doll. I either make something which reflects how I am feeling about the past year or something that I want to work on in the coming one. Here are the links to...
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What I did at the weekend
These are really not very good photographs of the work I did on the new Laura Ashley piece. I have had a big burst of interest in this quilt, and I am wondering if it is because the other large piece...
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Falling in love again
There haven’t been many posts recently as I have been finishing things off and there hasn’t been much to report, but suddenly I have quite a lot to post about. This is a big project from my work on...
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Will your anchor hold in the storms of life?
This is quite a small panel, one of the last ones I made, but the one which will be in the top-left-hand corner. Some of the panels have fents or offcuts instead of costume prints, including this...
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van Gogh in purple and yellow
This is the second sample from the Vincent van Gogh workshop, this time working with purple and yellow, which co-incidentally were the colours of my school uniform. I love this combination, although...
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