Once again it is a very long time since I updated my blog.  This does not mean I have been doing nothing, in fact I have been busy with textiles and exhibitions but I won't cover them all only the more recent events.

In the last couple of years I joined the Quilters Guild and the linked Contemporary Quilters.  Quilts is not a medium I explore very often.  However, I recently put quilts into Quilters Guild Region 2 annual event and was part of a small gallery with the other three who make up Fabricata.  The Region 2 challenge required a quilt created using two different fabrics 16inches wide and 40 inches deep.  My stash of fabrics is always growing and I have decided to use them rather than buy or print anything new.  I chose a finely woven cotton that was a breakdown print with shells printed on top and a very loose weave cotton dust sheet which I had used for breakdown printing.  The latter was easy to hand sew but stretched and moved under any form of machine sewing even with a walking foot.  So rather than fix it to another medium, I hand quilted that part of the work.  So a patchwork of images were joined and hand or machine stitched to create Round and Round or Caught in the Net,

 Caught in the Net

In 2022 I also exhibited at Ramster, a lovely historic house with a wonderful garden.  The exhibition was soon after the gales had swept through the southeast and the loss of trees was evident.  It was a very interesting and varied exhibition with a wide variety of work.

Early in 2022 The Worshipful Company of Broderers had an exhibition at the Bankside Gallery, London entitled 'The Art of Embroidery'.  My piece Underfoot was included.  It is a paper lamination of the path under my feet as I take a regular walk along the estuary to a beach on St Ives Bay.  The work was machine embroidered and hand stitched with some pebbles highlighted with darning.

 Underfoot

In October 2021 I decided to enter the Contemporary Quilters Challenge to produce a quilt that could be viewed from both sides and was 30cm wide at the top and 150cm long.  Much of my textile art is created as paper laminations from my photographs.  I put together a patchwork of photographs of footprints and sand patterns between high and low water taken over many years on the beach on St Ives Bay.  I made two long laminations of these images to create Between Tides.  Joints were raw edged with fine paper laminated linen between the back and front panels in places.  The whole was hand stitched and then machine quilted.   I was amazed and delighted when this won the Ann Tuck prize which I am happily spending on courses to increase my knowledge of quilting techniques.     

        Between Tides - back and front

In September 2021 I was part of the team that organised a two week exhibition at Denbies Vineyard, Dorking for the NEG.  This was a curated exhibition and I had two pieces selected.  Roots without Branches is a breakdown print on linen which was quilted by machine and hand stitched.  Unlike most of my work it is not based on the sea shore and does not use blue,

 Roots without Branches

I returned to my usual tones with blue and terracotta piece that was created from a mono print on linen off glassine (a very shiny surface that breaks up applied liquid dye).  It is mainly heavily hand stitched with some machine stitching - Shallow Waters was the result.

 Shallow Waters

At that exhibition the President's Challenge had to involve flowers.  My piece was a digital print of an image I had created from my work on line.  It was machine quilted with raw edge appliqué flowers.

 Floating Tulips