Although I am a bit of a neat freak one of my favourite methods for creating a jagged background is really messy. It is a one of those processes that gives the best results if you apply multiple layers of colour. Yesterday I took a piece of pre soda soaked cotton and started to apply thickened dyes through an open screen. I used a rust and half strength black colour family (as taught by Leslie Morgan at C2C). I roughly scrunched the fabric then screened on top, opened the fabric out, re-scrunched, screened on top ... over and over again with different colours. After adding quite a bit of colour I opened the fabric out and left on my bench overnight to dry.

Today I applied a second layer of colour using the same method and same colour family. I have left the fabric overnight to batch. Tomorrow I will rinse, wash and dry the fabric and assess the colours. I'll then soda the fabric again and keep going. It is time consuming process but the results are wonderful!

Yesterday I sent off my entry to the European Quilt Triennial. A big moment! And I could not be happier with the way the quilt turned out. The rules prohibit me showing the full quilt but here is a detail.

I have always had a fascination with buildings. I am a city girl and will take a cityscape over a picture of green, nature, countryside things any day. Cityscapes feature in some of my earlier works such as Sin City 2. My current Hidden Message series is inspired, in part, by high rise buildings in Shanghai. The spark that ignited the ideas behind the Ruins quilt was an online list of 50 abandoned buildings I came across quite by accident last year. From there I found the work of French photographer Martin Vaisse (www.flickr.com/photos/pheizy). His photos of abandoned factories are just stunning.

So I started looking at the textures and colours in old buildings. When I visited the Cloth and Memory exhibition at Salts Mill I took more photos of the building than of the art!

I spent last summer creating lots of fabulous cloth using a rust and black colour family. The good weather meant I was able to do lots of breakdown printing which seemed very appropriate. As an experiment I had a thermofax made from a photo of one of the breakdown pieces. I used this to build layers of line and colour.

Once I had a reasonable collection of cloth I started to construct 'brick walls'. I played around with the size of the bricks and with the overall dimensions of the pieced quilt tops. Ruins 1 and Ruins 2 (which is nearly finished) are both long thin pieces. They are meant to evoke a landscape. The quilting is dense but is not intended to distract from the textures and colours of the bricks.

I have a third piece in progress and a headful of ideas, both for printing more cloth and for making more quilts. I feel more comfortable with this series than I have with earlier work, including the Hidden Message series. It feels more intuitive, less forced. It feels like I have found my artistic voice.

Last year I read a review of a book by Steven Pressfield called The War of Art. I get fed the occasional 'how to be a better XYZ' as part of my day job and I am not a fan. But I felt like I needed some help in keeping focussed on my art, and the book was pretty cheap, so I thought 'what the heck'. And I am glad I did. Pressfield calls all the things that stop us achieving what we are truly meant to achieve 'the Resistance'. And most of them reside in ourselves. The book is an easy read, in turn humourous and somber. And it really resonated with me. I'm on my third read through and take the book with me when my day job takes me away from my studio. Over Christmas I brought and read his more recent book Turning Pro. The most basic message across both books is 'turn up, do the work, and don't let anything get in the way - don' let the resistence win'.

This week the Resistance was really strong. The first week in January is always miserable. Back to the day job after a couple of weeks without phone conferences, emails, reports and the realisation that I am very likely to be in the same place in 365 days. It is grey, cold and wet. And everybody everywhere is also miserable. And that was before turning on the news. For me the January blues was compounded by a stomach virus. But instead of soldiering on through I let the Resistance get me. For 3 evenings I watched TV and went to bed early. But I didn't sleep well. So on Thursday I went into the studio with the single goal of being in there two hours. Nothing more than that. But after I tidied some stuff that didn't need tidying I sat at my machine and I stitched. I turned up and I did the work. And woke up the next morning with a head full of quilt ideas.

This week was definitely not my most productive but I got back into the studio. And yesterday I heard that Sin City 2 will be shown in the CQ exhibition 'Inspirations' at Olympia later this year along side pieces from wonderful art quilters such as Janet Atherton and Kate Dowty and fellow Etcetera member Linda Bilsborrow. Go eat dust Resistance!

It is that time of year when traditionally some of us make grand statements about how we are going to change our lives. That has never worked for me. My 'big' decisions tend to creep up on me slowly. But once I make my mind up to do something I have a pretty good success rate. However I truly believe that I am even more likely to succeed if I make my decisions or my goals public. Which is one of the reasons why I have started this studio blog. So here goes! Last summer I decided that I wanted to create a new body of work from which I would submit pieces to the European Quilt Triennial and the Fine Art Quilt Masters (Festival of Quilts) in 2015. I also decided that I would rejoin SAQA so that I could submit a piece to their 'Concrete and Grasslands' call for entry in 2015. This is a pretty significant step up for me but, having spent the last couple of years focusing on developing my art, it does feel like the right time. And so far I am on track. The first piece in my new series Ruins is finished and will be entered into the European Quilt Triennial in the next couple of weeks. The second and third pieces are part way through quilting. And much more importantly I have a head full of ideas for the next pieces in the series. I'll share more about my inspiration for this series in future posts.

The other thing I want to focus on this year is social media and self promotion. In 2014 I met a goal of setting up an Etsy site to sell my hand dyed fabrics. The site looks great and I've thoroughly enjoyed dyeing and preparing the fabrics. But I am not selling anything. I am getting low numbers of hits but nowhere near enough. I also set up this website in 2014 and think it looks pretty good. But again I am not getting many hits. So 2015 is going to see me embrace Facebook and Pinterest. I am going to stop being a 'lurker' on chat sites and start contributing. All of which is definitely outside my comfort zone but then the most rewarding challenges often are!

Or more precisely glorious shades of teal, a light turquoise and a pale golden yellow. After the mayhem and excess of Christmas Day it has been lovely to spend the day in my studio dyeing fabric. A couple of years ago I took a 5 day Colour Studies Class with Leslie Morgan of C2C.(http://www.committedtocloth.uk/). It revolutionized how I use colour in my work. Leslie teaches a two step dyeing process that creates a family of 15 harmonious colours. One of the colour families I dyed during that class was the extended teal and brown family shown above. I have been using these fabrics in some of my Hidden Message pieces but needed to 'top up' my stash. So today I created 5 dye buckets - a dark, medium and light teal, a light turquoise and a pale golden yellow. I used a high immersion process and lots of agitation as I want fairly flat colour. I am a chemist in my day job so needless to say I keep detailed records of all my dyeing sessions. This allows me to reproduce colours fairly accurately. The dye buckets will be left overnight before I rinse and dry the fabrics. The second step will be carried out in dark, medium and light brown dye buckets. I will use a high immersion process again but with a little less agitation so that I end up with 22 different, slightly textured colours that go together perfectly!

There is a tale told by American singer songwriter Jim White that says something along the lines that you should count up your blessings, a minute here or an hour there, and put them in a jar. And if, at the end of your life those blessings add up to 15 years then you've had a pretty good life. My blessings have come in many forms; a loving and generous husband, happy and health kids, a wonderful grandson and a satisfying day job. But more recently my blessings have come from hours spent in my studio creating my art. I have stitched for as long as I can remember. Time working with fabric and thread has always brought me pleasure but somewhere along the path pleasure turned into passion. An interest became an obsession. A calling.

I define myself as a textile artist but I truly believe that art only exists when viewed by others. This studio blog is another step on a path that I am now committed to. But why a blog and why now? Why now is easy - 2015 is going to be an important year for me. As part of Etcetera, a group of 7 textile artists, I have my first gallery exhibition. Why a blog - because by documenting my progress it becomes a public statement of intent. Which is both terrifying and empowering. And, of course, a blog is a way of marketing myself and my art.

Those who know me will know that I am not a big user of social media - it takes time away from making art - so I will not be a prolific blogger. So expect posts once or sometimes twice a week. And expect them to be about what is happening in my studio and in my life as a textile artist.