The last 7 days have been exciting and terrifying in equal measure. I hung my latest exhibition with Helen Conway at Stockport War Memorial Art Gallery last Tuesday (with an awful lot of help from my son Callum and father-in-law Bernard). On Wednesday I was interviewed by Bethany Armitage of Quilt Now (very nerve-racking, article on the Stockport exhibition in the next issue). On Friday I launched myself as a teacher and on Saturday Helen and I had our preview. 

Definitely an emotional rollercoaster and I can't tell you how much I appreciate the response I've had to my workshops and to the exhibition with Helen. I spend so many hours working away on my own that sometimes I question what I'm doing and why. Affirmation keeps me going, big thank you to everyone that came to the preview, that responded to our posts on Facebook and an especially big thank you to the wonderful women who have booked on to my courses!

After the preview I drove up to Scotland for a weeks holiday in Dunure, my second most favourite place after my studio. The weather here is glorious and the sunsets over Arran are stunning. I have brought work with me to do but the sun is just too enticing ...... 

It is 5 weeks or so until my next exhibition with Helen Conway opens at Stockport War Memorial Art Gallery on Saturday 26th May and the only thing I have left to work on is a collaborative piece with Helen. Now I have written more than once about how I work in series and how I only 'work to the beat of my own drum' so this may come as a bit of a surprise. But maybe not to those who know us well.

Helen and I met several years ago at a local contemporary quilt group and went on to be founder members of the exhibiting group Etcetera. During the groups time Helen and my work evolved rapidly with Helen embracing acrylic paint and mixed media and me developing large, abstract pieces based on breakdown printing. But strangely our work always looked good together. Our colour palettes were similar and Helens wonderfully organic graffiti marks linked nicely with the somewhat random marks made by breakdown printing.

But work that looks nice together is not enough to make a successful collaboration. In my humble opinion it is the fact that we both approach our art practice in the same way that has made it work. We are both professional women in our day jobs and approach our art with the same level of commitment and professionalism. We are ambitious but also pragmatic. We are not precious about who does what; we just get on with stuff. We curate our exhibitions so that they work best for the viewer rather than vying for prime position.

The gallery in Stockport is a huge open space which has been easy to curate. With the exception of the section of wall that faces the double doors leading into the gallery. The wall is framed by two columns and whatever is exhibited there is inevitably going to draw the visitor towards it. So we knew from day one that we had to find some way to share the space. Rather than get distracted by this we both got on with our individual pieces. Knowing what the rest of the exhibition would look like we got together a few weeks ago and decided that we wanted to make a piece that was very obviously inspired by Stockport. Cue a quick scribble on a scrap of paper. I gave Helen some samples of the fabrics I wanted to use. Helen sampled her ideas and sent me photos. They looked great so she did her bit and I got cracking printing fabric. No angst. No worries.

I have about 35 hours of stitching to do to complete the piece but with 5 weeks to go our collaborative piece of art has been as stress free as the rest of our activities. Go team Helen and Leah!

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It is a weird feeling the day after a preview. My exhibiting partner, Helen Conway, and I put so much hard work into making the artwork, designing the gallery layout and marketing the event that the run up felt like riding a wave. Certainly I was so twitchy that I couldn't settle to anything in the last few days before the preview. The next day I felt like a bedraggled bit of seaweed left on the shore. That could have been caused by the white wine drunk after the event but more likely it was that deflated feeling you get after something big has happened. Like Boxing Day.

It might have been nice to take time out, read a book, have a nap, remind my family who I am but with the prospect of a second exhibition in just over two months that was never going to happen. So it is straight back into the studio. The next exhibition previews on Saturday 26th May at Stockport War Memorial Art Gallery. The space is much bigger than the St Helens gallery but Helen and I are consummate art professionals (or mad fools!!) and are absolutely certain that we will have all the new work ready in time. 

And who needs sleep? 

Three weeks to go until my exhibition with Helen Conway at The World of Glass in St Helens and another first for me - prints. In an effort to make my art more affordable I'm going to be selling limited edition prints of two of my new works (Sherdley Road and Ruins 8) along with limited edition prints of two detail shots. The prints are A3 and I'm really happy with the quality of the image (you can see all the stitching and fine detail) and the lovely heavy paper they are printed on. I'll be making them, along with postcards, available on my website from the 17th March when the exhibition opens. After much deliberation I have priced the prints at £55 each. Postcards will be £1 each. Time will tell if this is one of my better ideas!

I have had a good life.  Fortunate to have enjoyed the benefit of a first class education without crippling student debt. Fortunate to have brought our first house when my husband and I were just out of university. Fortunate to have been able to buy a larger house as our three kids got bigger. Fortunate that our house is big enough that our oldest son and grandson can live with us and still feel like they have their own space; their own lives.

Which is just as well as our son, a single parent on a low income, cannot afford the £750 per month he would need to rent a small 2 bed terraced house in Salford. And he is not alone. The charity Shelter estimates that 150 families become homeless every day in Britain. 150. A day. In what is still one of the richest countries in the world. I hope I won't offend anyone when I say that we should be ashamed of ourselves.

Homeless doesn't just affect those who struggle with mental health issues or those with substance abuse problems. It isn't a lifestyle choice. It can affect anyone. The break-up of a relationship, a landlord selling up, redundancy, spiralling debt when wages don't keep up with inflation. It doesn't take much and the problem is getting worse. The charity estimates that there are 128,000 children in the UK today who are homeless.

I have a good life. I have the time, money and space to make art. That is why I will be giving 15% of sale proceeds from my upcoming exhibition at The World of Glass in St Helens to Shelter. And, for the duration of the exhibition (17th March to 4th May 2018) I will also donate 15% of any sales from my website to the charity.

In aid of Shelter: Registered charity number 263710

I'm slowly working down my pre-exhibition to do list and am now the proud owner of postcards and display stands. I ordered my postcards from Moo. I have used them for business cards and love the quality of their products. This time around I was disappointed with some of the postcards - the images of my very pale 'Traces' pieces came out dark and dull. Not to worry though. The kind people at Moo have given me lessons on using the right colour profile (CMYK) and are going to reprint them. Great customer service! 

Well maybe that is a little bit dramatic but it is now only 44 days until my exhibition with Helen Conway opens at The World of Glass in St Helens. And only 37 days until we drop off the art work. Today Helen and I met with the curator Hannah to discuss layout and the minutia of things we need to do between now and then.

Getting the layout of the exhibition finalised is really important. Hannah and her team will hang the work and we wanted to be sure that we have the right number of pieces to fill this beautiful space. Turns out we can include an extra 4 metres of wall without crowding the space. Good job I made more pieces than I thought I needed. It does however mean that I will need to correct the scaled 3D model I have made!

So my to do list for the next 37 days:

• Send out the remaining Preview Invites.
• Finish final quilt (the original piece was finished in December but I liked it so much that I submitted it to the European Quilt Triennial. So now I am making a replacement. A 135cm x 240cm replacement. Good job I work in series!).
• Cut, drill and label top and bottom battens for three large quilts.
• Make storage bags for each large quilt.
• Iron, de-lint and carefully roll three large quilts in tissue paper before storing in their bags.
• Add hanging mechanism and mirror plates to 20 small pieces stretched over canvas.
• Wrap these 20 pieces in bubble wrap, find a box to store them in and print out a hanging plan for them.
• Decide whether 6 medium sized pieces currently stretched over canvas would actually look better framed (OK so maybe I should of thought of this earlier!)
• Add hanging mechanism and mirror plates to said 6 pieces.
• Wrap them in bubble wrap and print out a hanging plan for them.
• Collect 8 framed pieces from Manchester Custom Framing.
• These will come with hanging mechanisms and will be carefully wrapped so will just need a hanging plan printing.
• Make labels for everything. Sounds simple, takes forever to get them perfect.
• Get postcards printed ready for sale in the gallery.
• Decide whether to have limited edition prints for sale and get them printed.
• Get poster printed onto foam board for entrance to gallery (Helen is organising the design).
• Organise something for visitors to leave their details and comments on.
• Sort out drinks and nibbles for the preview with Helen.
• Decide what I will wear (this is the item that stresses me out most!).

Easy!

It has been a quiet year for submitting work as everything I do is focussed on my two exhibitions in 2018 so it was very nice to be able to submit an older piece to Quilt-Art-Quilt. And even nicer to be selected! Ruins 1 will be travelling to Auburn, New York for the exhibition at the Schweinfurth Art Centre. Exhibition dates are 28th October to 7th January.

I wish there were more opportunities to show pieces in more than one exhibition. Like every artist I would like to sell more of my work but the reality is that a lot of pieces just get stored away indefinitely after one public outing. Which seems a shame.

This week I have also resumed my 100 (week) day challenge working on small art for 2 hours each week day evening. It has been a good first week back - I managed 2 hours every evening except on Thursday where I managed 3 hours. I spent most of that time finishing the 20 small Canal Street pieces. Each is 8 x 8 inches and stretched over canvas. I'm now working on the 12 x 30 inch Kilns pieces. Busy, busy, busy!

I've completed 35 days / 7 weeks of my challenge and I'm really happy with my output but it still feels like hard work making myself go to the studio some evenings.

Today I have spent 6 hours at my sewing machine sewing hundreds of parallel lines on my latest large scale Ruins piece. And I have enjoyed every minute of it. Tomorrow evening I will be stitching parallel lines on the last of the small Canal Street pieces for next years exhibition and it will feel like a chore. Same process but on very different scales. I don't need a psychiatrist to tell me that my heart still wants to work BIG. But those small scale pieces are necessary - if only because they are more affordable. So I will keep going. Maybe when I get to 100 hundred days I will have fallen in love with working small ....

• Day 26 - 1 1/4 hours making thermofax screens.
• Day 27 - 2 1/2 hours finishing thermofax screens and starting Fragments pieces.
• Day 28 - 2 3/4 hours spent collaging 6 Fragments pieces ready for stitch.
• Day 29 - was out in the evening with the day job but still managed 1 1/2 hours - go Leah!
• Day 30 - Oops, had to spend two hours labelling and packing quilts to send to Festival of Quilts.
• Day 31 - 1 hour spent on layouts for the exhibition at World of Glass (I have more than enough small pieces, yes!) and 1 hour spent stitching.
• Day 32 - 2 hours stitchin'
• Day 33 - didn't happen, hot and stuff day so gave in to the temptation that is ice cream and a good book.
• Day 34 - 2 1/2 hours stitch'
• Day 35 - 2 1/2 hours stitching and adding little red accents to the Fragments pieces.