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.