Well a couple of months have disappeared and I have written nothing, April because I didn’t have much to say and May because I have been out and about. I say that I didn’t do a lot in April but I do many good walks, I decided that I would make the most of the good weather to be outside and that I would catch-up when it was wet, only it hasn’t been wet…

May began with organising ten small pieces for exhibition at the Cabane at La Port de la Pelle as in previous years, I made a couple of new birds and added some more abstract pieces happily one has already sold so I had to buckle down and make a replacement and I am just finishing another. I feel that I am really ready to tackle more serious work which is just as well because I have had confirmation for an exhibition in June/July next year.

Mid May saw me exhibiting at St Jean D’Angély for three days. It was a fantastic location and the first time that organisers has actually come to chose the work to be exhibited. I had work in two locations, actually the museum gave me a wonderful big space but only five pieces were selected to be hung there so they were a little lost. ( I admit though that I could get used to having somebody hang my work with the use of an infrared marker to ensure my labels were all straight!)

The second location was in the gallery of the Abbey where the light was good and it was easy to hang work. It was a positive exhibition in the sense that the others exhibiting with me were either embroidery biased (including Maryse Allard, Hubert Valerie, Stéphanie Michaud and Clare-Lise Calladine) or patchwork so I was the only one with art textiles and the feedback from the visitors was positive even if there were not very many of them.

At the end of the following week I headed off to the Morbihan region with the walking group amongst other places we visited Vannes, L’Île aux Moines and the Chateau of Suscinio.

I then stayed on a further couple of nights with a friend and we went to Auray, Locmariaquer and Carnac to visit the megaliths with a visit to Rochefort en Terre on the way home.

We visited Ste Anne d’Auray which had the most fantastic embroidered banners.

Barely home again and I headed off to near Limoges before taking a coach trip to Giverny and Roche Guyon. At Giverny we had a guided tour of an exhibition of work by Monet and Rothko there were only around six pieces from each artist hung in chromatic themes so as to compare the way in which both artists worked. One piece of Rothko’s work really caught my attention:

In the gardens there were crowds of people and my camera settings went awol but because the water lilies weren’t in flower and the rhododendrons were almost over it was a kind of mid-season. The herbaceous beds were really incredible although again it wasn’t quite the right season for a mass of colour. It is a garden to be visited at different times of the year to really appreciate it.

We spent the night in Vernon where the sunset on the Seine was calm and beautiful and lit the old mill beautiful in the evening light.

Then this week with the club I visited the gardens at Chaligny.

All in all it was a really interesting ten days with loads of photo inspiration and ideas buzzing around my head.

Despite all this galavanting I have done some stitching as well. I have kept up to date with my journal quilts finishing the fourth of the first series and the first two of the next. The idea always being to be the same but different. This current four are all using decolouration on commercial fabrics , the shapes are the same in each and there are only four fabrics , they are all stitched differently.

The second and third of my Fifteen by Fifteen pieces have also reached completion. Working in the style of Seurat the second was in black and white as per his pencil sketches and again I worked with reflections.

The third is worked by hand and inspired by the preliminary sketch he did for ‘The Circus’, I will go on to develop it further for the next piece.

Now I am packing to go to BIAT at Villefranche sur Soane for a four day show/salon where I hope to teach two classes one on symmetry and the other on stitched portraits. I also have a couple of new pieces which will be amongst those I am exhibiting but I am keeping things under wraps until the have been seen in public. This is a snap of the current work in progress relating to the symmetry class.