I started the year with so many good intentions of keeping this blog up to date but ‘life’ had other ideas, difficult to write when one has nothing to say and one’s horizons have been clipped or should I say severed.

After the show at Cholet I was gearing up to four days at BIAT, Villefranche-sur Soane and a days’s teaching at Pour l’Amour du Fil at Nantes and then Covid19 came along….. slowly but steadily things were cancelled or rather postponed.  Now well in to the second month of confinement I find that in many ways life hasn’t actually changed that much. I am, fortunately, use to being on my own and spending time sewing and I have plenty of projects to occupy me. I set myself some targets for the confinement but as usual I think that maybe they were over ambitious, I didn’t build in time for grey periods…. When the sun shines I feel full of energy and all feels well with the world, or at least my little corner, the house is flooded with sunlight and I can throw the doors open and even work outside in what I call my garden . That is another story, the lawn is more weeds than grass but it is very neatly mown and fairly regularly, most of the growing area is weeded but lacks plants and the parts which aren’t weeded are too dry to be able to extract the roots of the weeds. If I am lucky I will have a couple of parsnips and some pick again salad… The bird song is fantastic and there is a hoopoe is doing a great job on eating the grubs in the lawn.

I reckon that when I come out the other side I am going to wonder what I did with my time, each project I start takes longer than expected to finish and then I spent time earlier this week making masks, didn’t think it would take very long but 30 masks later I wondered where the time had gone. The plus of this lockdown period is Textile Artist.org who have organised weekly challenges with different artists, there is a video on a Monday and then a questions and answers FaceBook session on the Friday, even if I haven’t actually found the time to sew all the challenges they have been really interesting and informative. I am still doing my on-line course with Sue Stone but that has been temporarily put on the back burner and I can’t wait to finish the project I am doing to return to it. Ideas are now flowing far too fast.

The main consequence of the lockdown is that I can’t walk more than a 1 km radius from the house which means that there is not much chance to get out of the village, there is one lane around a field of flax flowers from where I can see the coast but it is a little like drink driving easy not to do do it at all than be frustrated ……

I try and keep interested in the natural world by photographing flowers most of which have been in the garden, that source is now just about finished for the time being but it is amazing what one can find when one looks

 

I have made the March journal quilt, I photographed a tuft of grass growing in a crack of the tarmac in the car-park at Cholet, I heavily quilted black wadding and then added the grass using an old veggie net and some plastic ribbon.

April journal quilt, based on an old tie I created a snail shell by hand stitching the motif on the tie after having machine stitched the motif itself. The inner part of the shell is painted with Inktense.

The end of March also brought the second Fifteen by Fifteen piece of the year. This time it was the letter ‘P’ and I was inspired by my visit to Pisa, the buildings were created in layers and the background quilted with the design of a wrought iron balcony I also photographed while I was there. I sun-printed  the sky and the word Pisa which are like clouds in the sky…

I am still producing work

and yesterday I painted the background for a new piece which I am really happy with.

I have hit a slight block with another piece I am machine appliquéing at the present because the thread keeps breaking and I can’t change thread because it would show so after a couple of days of trying different machine breaking two needles and loosing patience I have put it to one side for the time being! Onwards and upwards I am not going anywhere in the near future so hopefully time I will soon feel a sense of achievement, roll on May 11th when I will once again be able to go on long walks even if they have to be solitary. The real plus is that at last my garage has turned in to the work and storage space I wanted and it is tidy!