exploring the mystery of nature with painting & embroidery & mosaic
Puffin Commission Who doesn’t love puffins? With their brightly coloured beaks and funny walk, what’s not to adore about these cute little seabirds? I was recently commissioned to do a puffin embroidery based on the customer’s photo from a trip to Iceland where he spotted lots of wildlife. This puffin was posing on a cliff …
Since I was a small child I’ve always loved kingfishers. This piece ‘The Summer of the Kingfishers’ is inspired by the place down by the river where we used to go to play in the summer and have picnics. And it is where my father used to go as a child, where he learned to …
Shimmer shimmer shimmer. It’s taking forever to “sequinize” this peacock embroidery.
I’m still obsessed with grasses and tall flower spikes. I don’t think it’s going to go away any time soon. There are so many texture and colour combinations to be explored and every time I go for a walk I see something new – some little seeds or speckled leaves, or textured pods. I’ve spent …
The weather has been so warm and sunny recently (hip hip hooray!) that I’ve been feeling the need to use lots more yellow in my textile experiments – to be truthful the urge to use yellow started last year when we went to Andalucia and were submerged into a wonderful world of sunbaked olive groves, …
Here’s an update of my peacock embroidery. It is proving one of those embroideries that never seems to be quite ‘right’ somehow. It started out life as a very tight drawing of a peacock which I painted in inks on silk habutai, having done that it looked dull and contrived so I spread a load …
I feel like I’ve come to the end of this particular poppy piece; “Large Poppies” and it is now ready for stretching onto a box canvas. The piece was painted on silk then machine embroidered using free machine technique basically “drawing” with the thread. There is a LOT of stitching! I especially enjoyed doing the …
My love of poppies was rekindled yet again (!) by the late appearance of clumps of sumptuous oriental ones in my mother’s garden. They were surrounded by Michaelmas daisies and the glowing red and purple hues made for a heady colour combination in an otherwise drab October garden. How delicious! This started out as a …