While wishing you a Happy 2022 I am trying to promise myself that I will update my blog more often but in order to do so I need to get back into the habit of producing work! The festive season has seen me re-cover my dining chair seats and attack a tapestry, started more than twenty years ago, which I would like to get out of the way. I also made the mistake of giving myself a 3000 piece jigsaw puzzle….

Looking back on 2021 all things considered it wasn’t a bad year for me I made new friends and sold a fair number of pieces. After three years of Serge Billards inviting me to exhibit at Face à la Mer down on the coast I have worked out what works as far as sales are concerned. I started working on small, normally 20 x 20 cm pieces, mounted on a frame and they have proved to be very popular. Although I want to sell work it is important to me that these small pieces represent my way of working, this year I made a series of birds and some small more abstract pieces.

During these last few months I have also played around with the Katazome technique after having taken an online with Sarah Desmarais, it is a resist dyeing technique that I have always wanted to try and Sarah shared her way of more available materials. After a first attempt on silk organza with ready made stencils and a paper one which wasn’t strong enough I found that some sail cloth which I had made a really good reusable stencil and I tried again. It also works well as a stencil….

I also played around with a piece of shibori, having dyed the cotton it sat on my pin-board for some time until I saw the ‘marais’, the drained marshlands near home. For me there was a tangle of trees and the water in the foreground so I densely stitched the two areas, blue horizontally for the water and green vertically for the foliage.

Since the end October when I last updated this blog life has been calm even if I was involved in two exhibitions and one show. The first was Arts Atlantic in La Rochelle which involved 200 artists, I exhibited four 20×20 cm pieces along with fifty-nine other members of Gaspart17, I never got to photograph them together because they sold within half an hour of the show opening. I spent Saturday morning at the show and was really impressed by much of what I saw especially the work of Victoria Danville Vermeersch who works by sculpting textiles .

The next outing for my work was Fil’Passion at Perigueux, it was quite quiet but there were some interesting artists present. There was one piece which really intrigued me in an exhibition of work by a local group who had not exhibited before. This piece by Amandine Bézamat seen from a distance was really striking, close up there was a more visible three dimensional aspect.

The weekend before Christmas I was invited to exhibit at Sainte Marie de Ré, they invited all thirty of us who had had exhibitions in the town during the summer season to exhibit but only six of us were interested which gave us four metres of hanging space each, apart from myself there were three painters, a photographer and a sculptor which made for a very interesting exhibition. Sadly visitors were very sparse but some those who did come were very interested, I am happy to say that I was the only one who sold anything but then it was one of the smallest and cheapest things on exhibit!

Now my work is all stored away until I go, fingers crossed, to Cholet for Fils Croisés at the end of January.

The end of November also saw the completion of the last piece for the Fifteen by Fifteen challenge about countries, mine being Pakistan. This time it was fauna and flora and I chose to take a photograph of mulberries being collected for our dessert as my starting point. I printed the photograph on ExtravOrganza and then created the leaves using the above mentioned resist technique and stencils. The background was a piece that had rust dye on it and reflected the colour of the bark and dustiness of the surroundings. The mulberries were created with small beads.

So until next time…..