Until Festival of Quilts opens! Preparations are going pretty well although I do have a small mountain of fabric to rinse, wash, iron, cut and fold into Wonky Print Inspiration packs and Absolutely Darling Hand Dyed packs before we travel to Birmingham on Wednesday. I’m on stand E26 and you can find me in Hall 8 close to the Christine Chester gallery and the Quilt in Action area. I’m also close to The Creative Textile Studio.

To celebrate the event I am offering a 20% discount on my online workshops throughout the month of August. Use the code BYP20 to reduce the price of my Breakdown Your Palette workshop from £240 to £192 and the code SSP20 to reduce the cost of my Simply Screen Printing workshop from £300 to £240. Both workshops are ‘on demand’ so that you can work at your own pace. They each feature of 24 hours of videos, detailed notes and support from me via Zoom and email. (Codes are valid from 1st to 31st August.)

I’ll be screen printing and breakdown printing on my stand and I love to see you there!

It’s only 11 more sleeps before son Joe and I load up my van and his car and head off to this years Festival of Quilts. Held at the NEC, Birmingham, it is the biggest quilt show in Europe with galleries, workshops, competition quilts, The Creative Textile Studio and hundreds of traders. I’ll be on stand E26 in Hall 8 and am looking forward to a hectic, sometimes chaotic, hopefully profitable few days. I’m also looking forward to meeting up with many old friends, please do stop by and say hello!

This year I will have new greeting cards on the stand. I had them made for my solo exhibition earlier this year and had a great response from visitors to the gallery. There are 10 designs and I’m really happy with the quality. (I used a company called The Dandy Arthouse, great service). I will be adding them to my webshop after the show.

I’m also going to be taking some older, small pieces of art from my Structures series. I’ll be selling them at a fraction of their original price as I really can’t take all of my back catalogue when we move next year. Each piece is 8 inches (20cm) square and stretched over canvas. I’ll be putting any that are left over on my webshop after the show.

Best get back to printing fabric, those Wonky Print Inspiration Packs don’t make themselves!

Festival of Quilts at Birmingham NEC is just over eight weeks away and I can’t believe that it has come round so quickly!

You’ll find me on stand E22 this year which is in the main hall. It is a corner stand facing the Quilt in Action area. I’ll be demonstrating lots of different screen printing techniques on my stand and have already started to print and dye fabric for my Wonky Print Inspiration Packs and Absolutely Hand Dyed Packs. Last year I managed to make 112 Wonky packs and 34 Absolutely packs. Not sure that I’ll manage to print and dye as many this year but who knows! My son Joe will be on the stand with me and will be doing his best to make sure I take breaks and don’t fall over from exhaustion …… (Good luck with that son!)

Along with Hazel and Terry from InStitches, I’m also oraganising The Creative Textiles Studio at the show. The Studio will be near the VIP area and workshop bookings desk in Hall 9. You can see the timetable and read a little about our wonderful artists here. I hope you get the chance to visit as there will be demonstrations on a wide range of textile and mixed media techniques as well as a few goodies for sale.

If you haven’t booked your tickets yet I have 3 tickets to giveaway to the first 3 people to email me at admin@leahhiggins.co.uk. (T&Cs: These are for Standard Single Day Adult tickets and are valid on any day. Not valid on VIP, Two-Day or group tickets. Codes expire 11:59pm 28th July 2024).

I also have a discount code LEAHHIGGINS that can be used to save £2 on adult and concession tickets. (T&Cs: Save £2.00 on adult and concession tickets. Not valid on Thursday 1st August, VIP, Two-Day or group tickets. To purchase tickets visit www.thefestivalofquilts.co.uk. £3.50 transaction fee applies per e-ticket order. T&Cs apply. Discount expires 11:59pm 28th July 2024). This discount code is unlimited so please feel free to share with your friends.

Do stop by the stand and say hello!

My new online workshop is now fully uploaded and includes 29 hours of videos along with detailed notes. I printed a lot of fabric whilst creating the workshop and have put most of them into a gallery which you can find here. Some pieces were printed multiple times to create layers of line, shape and colour. There are some rather lovely pieces but I might be a bit biased!

As well as videos and notes I run monthly Zoom meetings and provide further support via a private Facebook group and email. You can find out more about the workshop (and sign up anytime) here.

I started my 2024 ‘teaching season’ at the beginning of April by teaching my 2 day Simply Screen Printing workshop followed by my 5 day extended Simply Screen Printing workshop. It was really nice having students back in the studio and seeing how differently they all worked. Different inspirations, different colours, some seeking strong pattern and shape, others exploring techniques that create more texture and fine mark. And yes, we did some breakdown printing! I’m on an extended family holiday for the next few weeks then it is all steam ahead …. teaching, printing fabrics for Festival of Quilts, more teaching, admin, more teaching until the season ends in mid-October. And I have a little lie down!

In case you haven’t seen it yet my solo exhibition Beneath Our Feet runs until Sunday 5th May at Salford Museum and Art Gallery. I gave my final talk there last Saturday. It was a remembering session based on my coal mining panels and it was wonderful to hear from an ex-miner and mine engineer as well as from people who had personal links to mining. The response to the exhibition has been overwhelming, humbling and, at the same time, empowering. An honour.

This week I heard that Ruins 9 Cottonopolis Revisited will be going to a new home after my solo exhibition at Salford Museum and Art Gallery ends on 5th May. Which is wonderful news although I will miss it. I make art for a couple of reasons; to get ideas and feelings out of my head and into a physical form and for the results to be seen, and hopefully appreciated, by others. Selling my art is a lovely bonus. An affirmation. That I am an Artist with a capital A. It banishes the doubts, the imposter syndrome moments. And makes me more determined than ever to reorganise my life so that I can make more art!

So, despite having a very long list of stuff that needs doing before my teaching season begins next weekend, I decided to treat myself. Initially I treated myself to a rather delicious custard slice. And then I gave myself the precious gift of time. Three days focused on making. Which doesn’t sound a lot but I hadn’t scheduled any ‘art time’ until mid-October. Too early to share images but I had a deeply satisfying time printing fabric and thinking about new constructions.

And now it is back to that schedule …. screens to varnish, fabric to soda soak, notes to be checked and distributed, requirements lists to be written, studio to be cleaned. This will be the last year that I will teach here in my studio in Manchester before we relocate and downsize (thus enabling me to spend more time making art!). Its shaping up to be a wonderfully busy one with the majority of classes either full or close to full.

The next four workshops each have one place left on them. I’m teaching my two-day Simply Screen Printing workshop (6th and 7th April) next weekend immediately followed by my, more comprehensive five-day Simply Screen Printing (8th to 12th April). There is then a break due to an extended holiday in Ireland before my five day Breakdown Your Palette workshop (13th to 17th May). And finally there is one place left on Clare Bullock’s Versatility of Felt workshop (20th to 24th May).

The year is going to fly by!

…… which is, obviously, my preferred pace of life! A big thank you to everyone that came to see me at The Scottish Quilt Show a couple of weeks ago. Especially all those ladies who have signed up for my Colour Play class at Region 13 (Quilters Guild) Summer School in June and just stopped by to say hello. I’m going to be teaching a class of 20 how to screen print with limited access to water, it’s going to be fun if a bit chaotic!

Thank you also to Bolton Textile and Stitch Group for inviting me to talk to them this week. It’s always nice to visit a large and thriving textile group and I enjoyed all the questions and chats after the presentation.

Looking ahead, I will be giving another talk at Salford Museum and Art Gallery on Saturday 13th April at 1pm. This one will focus on the coal mining pieces in my solo exhibition and I’ll be inviting people to share their memories of the mines in Salford and the surrounding area. You can find more details here. The event is free and no booking is required. The Museum is well worth a visit and you can usually park right outside at the weekend.

And looking further ahead I have just received confirmation that I will be teaching two 5-day workshops in Colorado, US in September 2025. I will also have a solo exhibition at the same venue. Super excited about this. More details to follow later in the year.

And the cherry on the icing on the cake - Storm 1 (Jagged), above, will be going to its new home in a few days.

Happy days, x

At long last I have started working again on an online version of my Simply Screen Printing 5 day workshop and book. I started last May with the hope of getting it done for Christmas but then a couple of small things got in the way…. Festival of Quilts and the solo exhibition. OK, maybe not small things. I’ll share lots more detail (and photos) over the coming weeks but I thought I might tease you with detail from one of the fabrics I’ve printed this week. It is intentionally pale and delicate. The first layer of print was created using a loose paper resist and the second layer was printed using an embedded object breakdown printing screen. Not my ‘usual’ colours but I have rather fallen in love with this piece and will be adding stitch to it during my annual retreat in the Lake District later this month. Calamities aside I intend launching the new online workshop on 1st March.

I’ve also been getting organised for a childrens workshop that I will be running at Salford Museum and Art Gallery on Sunday 25th February. Bit outside my comfort zone but it is good to give back to the staff at the museum who have done such a fabulous job hosting my exhibition. Although I might need to lie down in a dark room for a while having spent the afternoon with 30 children using textile inks and acrylic stamps to decorate aprons and bags! You can find more details here.

And just to stop me getting bored, I am also getting ready for The Scottish Quilt Show at the SEC in Glasgow from 7th to 9th March. You can find details of the show here. I only do a couple of shows a year and this one is actually my favourite. Yes Festival of Quilts is the big earner but it is just so busy and frantic that I never have time to really chat to people let alone visit the galleries. Whereas in Glasgow I get to chat and have a walk round. I also get to see my daughter who lives in Glasgow which is a bonus! So if you plan on visiting the show please stop by! Now I just need to print about 50 metres of fabric …..

Artefect 6 - new work for my exhibition Beneath Our Feet

I may have mentioned once or twice that I currently have a solo exhibition called Beneath Our Feet at Salford Museum and Art Gallery. The exhibition runs until Sunday 5th May however I will be holding a ‘meet the artist’ event there on Saturday 27th January from 1pm to 2pm. The event is free and you don’t need a ticket, you can just turn up.

There is another exhibition on that some of your might find interesting. It is called Islington Mill - 200 Years in the Making and contains some textile pieces. Islington Mill has been part of my family life at various times over the last 20 years and it is great to see how it has evolved over the years. The museum also has other galleries, a shop and a lovely cafe that serves really good coffee and cake!

I hope that some of you can join me, even if you have met this particular artist once or twice before!

…… because we all deserve some colour in our life during these grey January days!

May I wish you all a very happy and creative 2024 and express my thanks to those of you who have brought my fabric packs! You are definitely worth it ladies!

I thought I would start the year by sharing one of the new pieces I made for my current exhibition (Beneath Our Feet). This isn’t one that was rolling round in my head for ages, instead it popped out as a fully formed idea after seeing an image of a collection of solid coloured vases made by Pilkington Tile & Pottery Company around the turn of the 19th century. Pilkington is one of the inspirations for my Artefact series with all the quilts I have made so far being pale and quite subtle in their colouring. Not this one though …. which is why I have chosen to not call it Artefact 7.

Pigment #1 celebrates the wonderful, brightly coloured glazes developed by the Pilkington chemist Abraham Lomax and others. The development of these glazes was an early example of where scientific advances, in this case in inorganic chemistry, were applied to the art of the potter. Using Dimitri Mendeleev’s newly published Periodic Table as a starting point, the Pilkington chemists carried out hundreds of controlled experiments. Oxides of copper, cobalt and iron were used to add colour to the crystalline, opalescent, eggshell, transmutation and lapis glazes developed by the company.

I selected five colours - golden yellow, rust, dark brown, a turquoise and a green made by mixing turquoise and dark brown dyes. The fabrics were breakdown printed with multiple layers of print to build up the density of marks. I then added a layer of the appropriate colour to both the front and the back of each fabric creating a set of vibrant fabrics. The fabrics were cut into stripes then into different length pieces. I kept all the golden yellow pieces 3 inches long but varied the lengths of the other colours. I then used my usual composition process - I jumbled the fabrics into a big pile, closed my eyes and picked pieces at random. These pieces were laid out in the order I picked them before being sewn together. I did swap out a couple of pieces but that was all.

All good and such fun. I took photos with my camera as I worked so that I could post on Instagram. And something really interesting happened. The image above was taken with my fancy pants camera at 300dpi and is a really good representation of the colours. The image below was taken with my phone at 72dpi …. and the colours look so different even though the lighting conditions were similar. The green is indistinguishable from the blue and the brown looks much more blue than it actually is. Which is really weird. So I used my camera to photograph pieces of the blue and green fabrics with space around the two fabrics (scroll to bottom) and they are very definitely different colours.

The science of colour is fascinating. How we each ‘see’ colour is unique as it depends on the biology of our eyes but also on the interaction of different colours as they are placed side by side. And how we ‘share’ colour is dependent of the devices we use to capture and display colour.

I love it and am looking forward to having a colour filled 2024!