Mid-August 2026

Posted on by carolinehiggs

Well, I had hoped for drier, cooler weather instead we got the drier but not the cooler! If I have learnt anything this summer it is that the hot weather makes me very lethargic with a tendency to nap rather too often, not conducive to producing much work. I had the idea of continuing my work with earth pigments I have done some but again it was either too hot or too windy which meant drying was too fast or it blew away!

In mid-July I headed south, to the Haute-Garonne, to do a course on eco-dyeing; very hot and airless but very informative. We were a group of nine of mixed nationalities, English speaking, accommodated in an old farmhouse and fed with delicious wholesome meals. The heat meant that we didn’t go far afield but the local market in the village of Montbrun-Bocage was well worth visiting; we tried to restrict our daily foraging trips to early morning. I came home truly motivated and new ideas are bubbling in my head.

I completed the fourth Fifteen by Fifteen quilt, still with Time as the theme I used an old linen table napkin on which I had created the impression of trees when I coloured it with pigment which I then hand stitched with home dyed threads. I chose a quoted fro Ovid’s tree time in Metamorphoses telling how Jupiter was obliged to effectively restart the creation, “he restores rivers, gives grass to the earth, leaves to the trees and orders wounded woods to be great again” which of course happens over time. The bottom of the piece was filled with the words of the quotation repeated over and over. I am still part way through an on-line course using text as texture, I think that it will have to wait for the autumn now, there is no hurry as I have access to it for life!

The latest two journal quilts were also completed, one is a tree which I appliquéd and the last of four depictions of mosaic in which I wove the colours, the stitch lines were not too regular which reflects ancient mosaic tiles.

Finally I found a solution with which to finish I piece that I coloured last year with earth pigments. It has small amount of machine quilting but most of the background is hand-stitched and I introduced text to create more texture and pattern. The leaves were unsatisfactory eco-prints in the sense that there wasn’t much definition but the shapes were good. I dyed some abaca paper which I placed behind the leaves to give them a more withered look and machined the veins leaving the edges free.

I am hoping that this is the last heat- wave for this year and that I can really advance as I have some exhibitions coming up in the autumn. I still keep looking for patterns and textures to inspire where ever I am, my excitement bubbled over to find that with no special equipment I managed to photograph the eclipse several different stages. Without leaving the house and with the blinds down the sun was filtered through the aeration holes and was projected on to my kitchen wall, who needs special equipment!!!

June ’26

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Arriving home from holiday a couple of weeks ago I was ready to start producing some new work. Things have not gone quite as well as planned, I did get up to date with my journal quilts and complete the next piece for FifteenbyFifteen but then things began to go down hill. While I was on holiday I was bitten by a tick, two visits to the doctor in four days and I was given antibiotics against Lyme’s disease and another tablet against allergy, the latter would work well as a sleeping drug, I keep falling asleep ! This coincided with record temperatures, it was like a hot hair dyer blowing but without the air circling, to control the itch of the bite and keep it from being burning hot I was packing it with an ice pack, so I spent the most part of the week doing very little in a darkened house.

I had planned to get back to painting fabrics for several projects but it was, and still is, far too hot so I got out last year’s pieces and picked one to work on. I am often asked how long something takes to complete, that is always very difficult to answer, how long is a piece of string? The photo shows the project in question, the fabric was sized, painted and dried for 4 weeks before having the final coat added. Yesterday I auditioned threads for hand sewing, that resulted in dyeing a selection, they had to be over-dyed to get them dark enough, washed dried and would on to supports. Twenty four hours later I am now ready to start sewing and the hours have already flown by. When dyeing threads I always take a selection of threads because they all turn out differently, these are all cotton threads and dyed with procion dyes.

Recycled cotton sheet coloured with natural earth pigments, hand dyed thread

Since I last wrote I have worked my journal quilts and completed the first 4 FifteenbyFifteen pieces on the subject of time. The fourth can not yet be disclosed, that will be the end of July. I have travelled twice this year, once to the UK to meet my newest nephew and visit friends during which time I visited the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter to see the Grayson Perry exhibition, I was disappointed, I had seen some of the work and I fund it expensive for what it was, the textile section of the museum was interesting. I also saw some great costumes, at Killerton House, including a mourning dress worn by Queen Victoria.

Three roman landscapes on recycled linen

First two journal quilts, May and June, depicting roman mosaics using one colour.

Fifteenbyfifteen: Time N° 2 depicting a few lines of Shakespeare’s Time. Recycled cotton sheeting coloured with earth pigments and over painted, hand stitched and commercial fabric machine stitched and hand stitched with the word time.

Like as the waves make to the pebbled shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end, Each changing place with that which goes before, In sequent toil all forwards to contend….

Fifteenbyfifteen: Time N° 3. Tide and time wait for no man. Old linen table napkin coloured with earth pigment and highlighted with inktense sticks. Man and board appliquéd and the wet suit has the saying written on it in continuous text, copy of a tide timetable on organza, fading with time.

The second break was for walking but there was also a lot of inspirational art firstly in Aubusson at the tapestry centre then in many churches of the Haute Loire there were murals, some better than others. At la Chaise Dieu the religious tapestries were amazing.

I have had three exhibitions, one solo on the Ile de Rè for ten days and two where I had a displayed the Gaspart exhibitions , Lagord and La Rochelle. I am now working towards a new body of work, hoping for cooler drier weather so that I can create new backgrounds. I did manage to paint some fabric on the beach on the Ile de Ré during my lunch break while I was at my exhibition.

This last piece, which was exhibited with those in the other images at the A.N.C.R.E. Maritaise, Ste-Marie-de-Rè, is coloured with earth pigments and the orange and green is continuous text written ink “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air” (Thomas Gray; Elergy, written in a country churchyard)

My inclusion of text is as result of being in the middle of a very motivational online course with Claire Benn and is aimed at using text as a texture. I am halfway through and need to find the time to continue because it is challenging me to try new ways of working.

October ’25

Posted on by carolinehiggs

At the end of April I set off to Portugal to walk 200+ km along the coast. We had a nasty surprise at the outset because due to a power outage in Spain and Portugal our flight was cancelled just as we had arrived at the passport and security check. At 9.30 pm we found ourselves, and all the others on the flight, without our plane to Porto. Having had a doubt during the afternoon I had researched other means of getting there which is how at quarter to one in the morning we found ourselves getting on a bus, we had to change at Bilboa but it meant that we would only arrive 24 hours late and miss the first day. It was a long haul, the first bus was comfortable but the second had no suspension and the Spanish and Portuguese roads are not the smoothest but we finally arrived. Ten days of Atlantic coastline was magical and until the last couple of days really wild. After the third week spent exploring the Algarve I came home with a head full of ideas and the creative juices began to flow.

A sea view and a piece which resulted from the trip.

I had only a week at home before going off again for 5 days but in that time I decided to sign up for an online course with Claire Benn through the Fibre Arts Two platform. The trip was to the other side of France where we had great weather and visited Arc-et-Senans an old royal saltworks with the most stunning architecture and Besançon and its citadelle amongst other places.

Arc et Senans at sunset from the gardens.

Again many ideas and I felt ready to spend the summer producing some new work. Doing the course on-line motivated me, Claire is an excellent teacher and I found myself rethinking how I work. I was using earth pigments and recycled fabric and it all felt so right. I love stitching whether with the machine or by hand but we were encouraged to look at our work and see if we needed to stitch, it is a different approach and it really made me question what I was doing. I have used the long dry summer to experiment and start to understand how I can achieve the results which inspire me. I still have a long way to go but it is so exciting!

Now have gathered together some new work which was exhibited a few weeks ago at the local Fete des Arts where I was exhibiting for the fifth time at my friends’ house I was curious to see how my ‘new’ work was accepted. 

Once the exhibition was over, less of a success than previous years probably due to the weather, I headed off to the Gers region for two weeks. The first week was with a walking friend, the second with the club. It is a beautiful area and almost each village has some curiosity to discover.

Some of what we saw along the way, churches, fortified villages, transhumance (sheep walking three weeks back home from their summer pastures in the mountains), ecclesiastical stitching etc.

I have continued to keep, more or less, up to date with my journal quilts for the UK Quilter’s Guild Contemporary group and also with my work for the Fifteen by Fifteen group, and, needless to say there is also some new work in the pipeline as soon as I have time.

Below are three of my Fifteen by Fifteen pieces on the subject of decay. The last two used earth pigments for the base colour.

Damp November

Posted on by carolinehiggs

Here we are at the end of November, the time has flown by since I last updated. At the beginning of October I spent a night in hospital for planned sinus glitches that was followed by a light dose of shingles so it was relief when I set off for the UK at the end of the month to visit family and friends for three weeks.

For once I was around for the journées de patrimoine and I went to the Mairie in la Rochelle to see the textiles on display, these comprised of a life size contemporary embroidery (cross stitch) of Aliénor d’Aquitaine celebrating 900 years since her birth and some rather wonderful wall tapestries.

The last Saturday in September saw me invited to teach around a hundred ladies at a friendship day for France Patchwork south of here near Angoulême in the Charente region, a little hectic but I believe that everybody went home happy with what they had achieved and I failed to take any photos!

At the beginning of October I hung 17 pieces at Le Sauzy, a parish hall which holds many different types of events . The hanging space is well lit and I was delighted to be invited to exhibit my work for a couple of months.

The UK was foggy, damp and cold but there was plenty to do and see. I made use of my National Trust membership to visit two lovely properties, Oxburgh House in Norfolk and the grounds of Knightshayes in Devon. In the former were the most lovely embroideries, rich leather and burnished velvet wall coverings which were a real surprise. The bed hangings arrived at Oxburgh around 1761 and were removed in the 1950’s and taken to the V & A which has loaned them to the National Trust.

The grounds of Knightshayes are fantastic and many of the plants are labelled, there were a surprising number of plants flowering and luckily the rain stopped for our walk around the woodland garden. The were some woven willow structures of wildlife secreted amongst the trees.

I also visited Country and Eastern in Norwich which has a collection of South Asian artefacts. Not only were there old textiles on display but also stunning carved wood and some enormous windows and doorways. I was particularly drawn to the Pakistani and Indian pieces. The building is an grade 2 listed old roller skating rink with the most incredible wooden roof. It opened as a rink in 1876 but a year closed due to financial difficulties and had a chequered career until it was transformed to its present use in 1993. There was so much to see in the museum section and to buy but I managed to keep my hands firmly in my pockets.

En route between friends I visited the Honiton lace museum, they had an interesting display of lace from all over Europe showing the different styles, then also drawers of lace in chronological order some of which was so fine and intricate. The first piece is the Esther Clarke flounce which was made for the Great Exhibition of 1851. I also managed to find my grandmother’s old house which I hadn’t seen for sixty plus years but which I recognised instantly.

On the stitching front I haven’t done much, the quilt I made for god-daughter’s wedding present was finished on time and was safely delivered, it was large and I had trouble photographing it, I had to hang it sideways on the washing line, hence the photograph is a little strange. I embroidered some of the panels and tried to keep to the colours that she liked to try and keep in harmonious. The whole piece was hand quilted.

I finished the last two pieces for Fifteen by Fifteen on the subject of Children’s books the first was The Adventures of Robin Hood and the last will be divulged later as we have not yet had the reveal. I am now trying to catch up with my journal quilts, September’s is posted and the last three for the year will be done very soon. All the quilting took up a lot of time and I now want to get back on track with creating, I need to make some new work, not that I have any exhibitions planned for 2025 as yet, because I have sold some of the newer pieces and I prefer to exhibit new work when I do exhibit.

September

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And here we are a quarter of the way through September with little to show for the months which have passed, the Tour de France was good, the Olympics even better but stitching has been slow! Late spring/early summer was busy I went to Madrid for a few days in April followed by an unscheduled hospital stay and a week recuperating. May saw me spending a week walking on the Amalfi coast in Italy followed very closely by a three day exhibition at St Jean d’Angely and a week walking near the Pont du Gard.

The wonderful exhibition space at St Jean d’Angely.

Italy, coastal walks and visits to Pompei, Naples, Vesuvius and Capri to name but a few….

What to do with a run down town to attract visitors, rock formations, Pont du Gard and pottery.

At the end of June I participated in open studios, unfortunately there were loads of different events the same weekend so few visitors, on the plus side I tidied and painted the interior of the garage to create a showroom.

During the summer I didn’t walk very much but I did realise that by not walking I wasn’t stimulating my ideas, must walk more….

While walking I love discovering new paths and places to visit and sometimes there are surprises along the way like this couple or even the altar cloth in a church which was built in an old barn in the late 1990s.

Last weekend I participated for the fourth time in the local art festival, artists display in houses and gardens around the village, Saturday’s storm didn’t help visitor numbers but Sunday was brilliant and I really appreciated the positive feed back.

I have kept more or less up to date with my journal quilts on the subject of hidden:

Then there have been two 15 by 15 reveals on my subject of children’s books.

Last but not least two new pieces which I exhibited at the weekend:

And , finally as I pack away one exhibition I am preparing fro the next….

Already April

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Well, I failed to update in March and now it is mid-April…. I simply don’t know where the time goes. Last week I came home after two wonderful weeks walking in Madeira, wind, rain and clouds were high on the menu although we began and ended with a few days of sunshine. It is a very green volcanic island with plenty of up and down with some tunnels thrown in. Although early in the season there were flowers and the most wonderful forests, sadly the best day for trees was so wet that I left the camera at the hotel but I came home full of ideas!

During March I had work in a local art exhibition which seems to have been well received.

On the stitch front it doesn’t seem that I have achieved much, I finished a new piece which was designed to be mounted on a canvas except that the stitching reduced the size radically so that plan went out of the window, despite leaving a good margin of error.

The March Fifteen by Fifteen piece, the second ‘books’ was completed. This time I chose Wind in the Willows which I love, more for the memories of pantomime (Toad of Toad Hall) which was a family favourite than the book. The opening chapter is about the mole discovering the wonders of the river bank with the water rat, I just love the idea of the animals exploring new territories. It is virtually all machine stitched.

My March journal quilt was also completed, the forest with hidden squirrels. I really enjoy doing the monthly journal quilts as they give me the excuse to play around with different ideas. The hidden element is the quilting of the squirrel forms.

My next book piece is on the table and my April journal quilt has been to Madeira and back and hasn’t been touched and plenty of other ideas are swimming around in my head. This week with the sunshine the garden rather took up all my time, with all the rain everything has grown and the weeds had taken over, the lawn took two cuts to make it look anything like a lawn.

Grey and wet February

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As per usual I don’t seem to have much to show for the month. I finished the first challenge for the Fifteen by Fifteen group, this year our theme is books and we were each free to choose our genre but we need to include some words. I found a theme very quickly, relating to sewing and stitching, but then changed track to children’s books with the thread of ‘trees running through all six pieces. It suddenly seemed to make sense that current projects all tie together. My first choice was the House at Pooh Corner by A.A.Milne, it is a book my mother loved and which I read to her the day she moved care homes not long before she died. Inspired by the drawings by E.H.Shepard I chose Pooh trying to find the right kind of bees for honey….

I used cotton which I painted as the sky, then I stencilled some ‘leaves’ before appliquéing the tree, the trunk is an old sheet and the branches a finer cotton. Once machine stitched I added another layer of ‘leaves’. The blue sky is lightly hand stitched, my bear is dyed wadding , the ballon a scrap of sari silk and I used a basic string. The rather odd bees are beads. 

A small piece travelled off to America for the SAQA auction, measuring only 6 x 8 inches, I used fabric I had in my stash left over from a larger piece of work. Machine and hand stitched.

I am also doing journal quilts again with the British Guild’s Contemporary group, the subject is Hidden and we first two are once again based on the subject of trees.

January: insects hidden amongst the trees

February: a few leaves hidden by the trees

As a result of teaching a lesson of lino cutting in the autumn I played around with a repeating pattern which I slowly stitched by hand. I have now mounted it on a frame.

This year for the third time I participating in the ARTbook which is a listing of artists and galleries in South Western France the majority around La Rochelle but also from the Bordeaux area and places in between the two.

January 2024

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The best laid plans of mice and men, Go oft away….. (Robert Burns)

Firstly Happy New Year, I hope that there will be good health, peace and creativity for everybody.

I have been hiding with the excuses that the computer needed updating to have better access to my blog and that I had nothing new to show, both problems are now remedied so watch this space…

In June the exhibition space and conditions at the Chateau de Lacaze in the Tarn were excellent and I was able to exhibit all the 38 quilts that I took with me. As planned I stayed the first week; stormy weather but two lovely walks and a visit to Albi which I had wanted to visit for a long time. I wasn’t disappointed. The Saturday of the first week I taught a class which was well received by enthusiastic students, the accompanying textile weekend was sadly not well attended but it was really hot….

Two weeks later I returned with a friend, we set off early and managed to visit Moissac, Grauhlet and Lautrec before arriving at our accommodation. I first visited Moissac when I was on 16 and on an exchange visit and had always wanted to revisit, I wasn’t disappointed. Grauhlet was a thriving leather producing town sadly now rather sad but the museum was interesting. We walked all week discovering different small areas, the countryside was for the most part wooded and shady (thankfully as it was very hot) and the paths were at time rather steep. We managed to visit churches and small museums along our routes.

In August I took part in a three day village arts festival not far from Cognac. The entire village joined in and the exhibitions were held in people’s barns, courtyards, gardens etc, we were given lunch in the village square and there were evening entertainments which I didn’t attend but the whole event was really well attended and I returned home with fewer quilts than I took with me.

In September I took part in the local fete des arts, based with friends as per the last few years it was a great weekend and once again some of my work found new homes. It was then off to Alsace to the European Carrefour with the quilts for our on-line group Fifteen by Fifteen. It is a really long drive bt we were rewarded with excellent exhibition space and it was really well received by the general public.

Not long back from the show and I headed off to Sardinia with a group of walking friends. Due to lack of flights we had a couple of extra days to spend in Cagliari, two of us ventured off and saw most of what the town had to offer and we also took a bus south to visit the old ruins of Nora. The walking was wonderful, rocky and relatively wild although we did take some well worn hiking trails.

My Fifteen by Fifteen series were finished with the second bird, a griffin vulture and two quilts of vegetation that I saw.

I also finished my journal quilts, having produce six types of different leaves for the first six I then went to the shape of the tree adding quotations about each. The idea was to work with words and I tried to produce them in different ways. I have never really connected to adding text but I found the exercise a useful one and now know which methods I prefer.

The latter part of the year I started producing new work again, the pieces that sold during the year were, for the most part my newer ones so I need to build up new stock, I have finished two and there are more in the pipeline alongside a wedding quilt which I won’t show until I have delivered it in November

That rounds up 2023, now I need to work out how to be more adept at creating each post but the essentials are there, thank you for reading to the end!

Time has flown once again…

Posted on by carolinehiggs

It is only as I am packing up my quilts for exhibition in the Tarn that I realise that I have not updated these pages since January . The Tarn is a month long exhibition which while require two trips, one to set up and one to take down. The three days of lessons I planned were cancelled due to lack of participants but I am hanging around for a few days to teach a class on Saturday during the textile weekend. Typically the forecast is for stormy weather so I hope to get a lot of sewing done and hopefully discover the region between storms!

I seem to have been busy this year and there is always stitching on the go but I have also been out and about much more. January started with a week of snow shoeing and exhibiting at the Gallerie Arnaud in La Rochelle followed by the show at Cholet at the end of he month. February and March disappeared; what with spending at least two mornings a week volunteering, pilates on another morning and often walking twice a week my time stitching has been reduced, but I think being out of the house more is good for me. In April went on a 4 day coach trip to Amsterdam taking in La Piscine at Roubaix and Ghent en route, with a stop in Lille on the return. We were too early for the tulips but the hyacinths and narcissi were wonderful and the dahlias I purchased seem to be growing, lets hope summer isn’t too dry! Amongst other things we visited the Van Gogh museum and the Vermeer exhibition at the Rikjsmuseum. A week later I was visiting Portugal, staying just south of Lisbon where there were many good things to discover.

Above the Piscine, they have an “exceptional collection” of fabric samples only a few of which are on show.

Woman writing a Letter, with her maid 1670-1672; I really enjoyed the Vermeer exhibition far more than I thought I would, the clarity of the work and the light in the pieces were amazing.

Cathedral, Lille

Portugal was just so inspiring…

Mid-May there was a walking club weekend in the Anjou area where we had visits as well as good walks.

Chinon and Fontevraud

Then, finally last week I circumnavigated the Ile d’Oléron on foot with a couple of friends and I managed to take in the Festival d’Arts Actuel at the Citadelle of Chateau D’Oléron as we were staying nearby.

So much inspiration and so many vibrant colours

Stitching wise I am up to date for the moment with my journal quilts, this year we have to include text and I decided to create a series about leaves and trees, the first six are leaves complete with the name of the tree, its scientific name its order and family. I have tried to construct each family of leaves with a different technique while keeping the text the same but again worked differently.

My first three Fifteen by Fifteen pieces have also been completed, this year we have to make three pairs of quilts under the heading of nature. I decided to use my holiday in the Bardenas, Spain, for my inspiration, the first two on rock structures and the second two will be birds birds, the first one of which is below.

The first quilt is of the landscape of ‘Los Aquarales de Valpalmas’. The Aquarales is like the Bardenas Reales but on a much smaller scale. Both areas have a characteristic morphology known as badlands and are formed by the erosion of the clay landscape, in the Bardenas the cliffs can reach a height of 150m but they are only a scant 20m in the Aquarales. The landscape of multiple columns and pinnacles of differing forms and sizes a third of the size of those 50km away in the Bardenas. Hand painted silk noile, appliquéd and machine stitched.

 In stark contrast to the crumbly rocks of the Bardenas, the Mallos de Riglos which is well known area in the climbing world because its conglomerate formations which are well suited to climbers. They rise high and relatively straight out of a truly wild landscape full of plants and bird life with well marked walking routes. The photograph I worked from shows the sunlight shining through a narrow space between the rocks and I loved the way the colour changed so radically between the light and shade. Painted, appliquéd and machine stitched.

We stopped to photograph a field full of storks on our way back to the hotel one evening, they were feeding in a mucky humid field. Hand dyed fabric bought in Canada and the birds appliquéd and hand stitched.

Most of my time was taken up on my tree project, some of the top stitching was machined but the main part was hand stitched and it took forever, the finished piece measures 150 x 200 cm. As yet I have no photograph of the finished quilt because I have nowhere to hang in good enough light to photograph, hopefully next week will remedy the problem! I really enjoyed making this mammoth piece, it was an idea which had been turning in my head for ages and involved using wood blocks that were made for me from my designs in India some years ago. I used different textured fabric to create effects.

Just a small sample of the whole.

As you can see there is no lack of inspiration just lack of application, there is so much I now want to explore…. watch this space.

January 2023

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All the best for the coming year.

Looking back I realise that after spending hours constructing an entry at the end of October it has never been published, heaven knows where that went, what a waste of time and energy! There were lots of photos of inspirational things I had seen but there wasn’t much work produced in that period and I have attempted to remedy that.

I finished the last 4 journal quilts for the year using the same hand dyed fabrics and shapes but the position of the fabric and the stitching for each one.

The last two pieces in the style of Georges Seurat for Fifteen by Fifteen were completed as well. I really tried to use pointillism in these two, fiddly to do but I was happy with the result, especially with the last one when I found a better support for creating my dots of colour. Working in the style of Seurat with the subject of reflections has taught me a lot and I really enjoyed the challenge because it pushed me to work in different ways to get the results I wanted.

In August I posted a piece I had printed and which, now, has been finished by hand stitched around the tree forms leaving the fabric to speak for itself. The second I printed in white and then machine stitched before adding leaves cut from silk scraps. ( long thin pieces are difficult to photograph!)

Then next project which is still in the quilting stage is big, again using lino cuts but also wood blocks which I had made for me some years ago in India. Based on trees and using various different hand dyed fabrics it is, in part, constructed using a traditional patchwork format.

The year ended with an exhibition organised by the association Gaspart in la Rochelle and January will see me exhibiting twice. I am delighted to be one of six people, the others are painters or sculptors, to have been invited to exhibit at the Galerie Arnaud in La Rochelle. The end of the month I will be exhibiting once again at Fils Croisés in Cholet .