Last week I had the wonderful Amanda J Clayton teaching her four day Quietly Composed workshop in the studio so I was able to spend some time figuring out what my online shop will look like as I move forward. My core offering will remain my books, my workshops, dyes + auxiliary chemicals, screens and squeegees but other items will be dropped.

So I’m having my first clearance sale with more to follow as I work through the studio. I have reduced the cost of textile inks from £6 to £4 and the transparent extender used with the inks from £7 to £4.50. I have also reduced the price of acrylic shapes and thermofax squeegees by 50% or more. You can find the details by clicking here.

Now back to Amanda …. she arrived with the most amazing collection of finished pieces, samples, fabrics, threads, papers and ephemera. The six students were absolutely delighted … even when the drawing exercises took some of them outside their comfort zone! Amanda comes very highly recommended! Enjoy the eye candy below …..

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!

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!

Cadence 8: Flamin’ Nora

In our heads we know that, as artists, we shouldn’t take rejections to heart. It doesn’t mean our art isn’t good, it might just mean that it doesn’t work alongside the selected pieces. And I’ve had a good success rate so far this year so shouldn’t mind a rejection. Or two. But my heart rules my head when it comes to my heart so poo to being pragmatic!

My latest piece, Cadence 8: Flamin’ Nora has just been rejected by Quilt National.

Which is kind of appropriate as the quilt is a celebration of creativity in the face of life and other annoying stuff. I started work on it over a year ago and everything that could go wrong has gone wrong and everything that could interrupt production has. So it is dedicated to those days when blobs of dye drip onto your printed masterpiece. Those days when you forgot to add a colour catcher to you wash load. When you measure once and cut wrong. When your bobbin thread runs out 2 inches before the end of the last seam. When you spill coffee. When your beloved decides it’s a beautiful day and you should spend it together. When the phone rings and apparently there is a fault on your broadband. When the phone rings and it’s your mother espousing the benefits of cauliflower cheese. Again. When the parcel arrives and you’ve ordered the wrong colour thread. When your machine breaks down one week before an important deadline and it’s a two week repair. When that deadline is Quilt National and you end up buying a new machine ‘cos you just have to finish the flipping quilt. For the days when you get rejected. Flamin’ Nora!

Despite all this I really love this quilt, it makes me smile and I am so glad that I did get it finished.

I also love Artefact 5, another recent piece, which has just been rejected by Australias’ International Art Textile Biennial. Poo and double poo!

And because bad things come in threes I can also report that my thermal imaging machine has finally died so I’ve withdrawn thermofaxes from my website. Poo, poo and triple poo!

Thankfully I am one of life’s optimists and, with the help of chocolate and gin, I am completely over the bad news! Onwards and upwards!

Artefact 5

It has been a strange couple of weeks here in the UK with so many things paused and general life feeling somewhat subdued. But now things are getting back to normal and I am delighted to let you know that I will be at this wonderful new event, the Great Northern Textile Show and Sunday 23rd October.

I’m honoured to be the featured gallery artist and will be showing a mixture of old and new quilts under the title ‘Beyond Ruins’. You can find out more about the gallery here.

I will also have a stand at the show and will be in very good company. The organiser, Tracy Fox, has done a really good job of gathering a diverse range of traders and you can find out more here. There will be fabric, kits, yarn, spinning equipment, sewing & embroidery machines, dye, fibre & fleece and much more.

You can follow the show on social media using the links below:

https://www.instagram.com/greatnortherntextileshow/

https://www.facebook.com/greatnortherntextileshow

https://twitter.com/GNTextileShow

If you live in the North West I’d love to see you there! This first event is a little acorn but with your support it will grow and grow!

Detail, full image below.

You may remember a small quilt (well small for me) that I made last year in response to the Contemporary Quilt Group challenge ‘Uncharted’ called Taming The Wilderness. It’s the long skinny one that is part of my Cadence series. The organisers will be showing all 77 entrants in different groupings at different events over the next 12-18 months. I am absolutely delighted that my quilt has been chosen to be one of the 35 quilts that will be shown at this summers Festival of Quilts (18th to 21st August). It will then travel to Exeter, Glasgow, Birmingham and London between September 2022 and April 2023 as part of the ICHF shows.

But before then the quilt is getting its’ first showing at QuiltFest at the Llangollen Museum in Wales. QuiltFest is a little smaller than normal due to Covid restrictions but will still be worth a visit if you live nearby. Llangollen is a lovely town surrounded by stunning countryside. Sadly I won’t make it this year but have enjoyed the show in the past.

Taming The Wilderness was inspired by the artwork on an album called The Wilderness by Explosions in the Sky. The artist is Jacob van Loon and you can find the piece 8th & Main here. His work is amazing and I can see it inspiring more pieces in the future. So, in all its glory, here is Taming The Wilderness -

Sample made for my new Artefact series

My art goals for 2022 are simple. Make more. Submit more. The need to earn a living and to care for my family are what they are and mean that making art has to fit around them. One of the reasons I left industry and started teaching in my studio was to get a much better balance between these three parts of my life and it was, despite the disruption caused by the pandemic, the best decision I’ve ever made. I now have periods of time, mostly in the winter, when I can work on my art full time and without interruption. This is great for developing new ideas and starting on new series. But if I am going to make more art this year I need to figure out how to always have a piece or pieces part made that I can work on when I only have a few hours or a few days free.

I love making big art but the composition / construction stage really needs space (my big print bench and my design wall as a minimum, yes I’m spoilt) and time because I really don’t want to be unpinning hundreds of bits of fabric from my design wall each time I need it for a workshop. Whereas the quilting stage just needs room to get my sewing machine out. And a bit of clean space to fold / roll the quilt so that I can get it through the tiny throat on my machine. So, before my teaching schedule really kicks in in March I need to prepare several ‘backgrounds’ to use in Artefact and Cadence pieces. I can then spend the spring and summer quilting these backgrounds and adding the foreground details. Unfortunately I don’t completely ‘design’ my pieces early on in the process. My ideas evolve as I stitch. I don’t 100% decide on foreground details until I have finished the construction, and sometimes the quilting of the background. Inevitably some of the backgrounds that I prepare over the coming weeks will need to be cropped as I add those foreground details. Which feels wasteful but I’m hoping allows me to make more art this year.

My other goal is to submit more. I used to be good at keeping a list of upcoming calls for entry to curated shows and submitting proposals for gallery space but got out of the habit in 2020 when I lost touch with my art practise. I started submitting pieces again last year and have had some success with Cadence pieces but I need to build on this. I need a steady flow of new work to make this possible. And I need to become OK with rejection again. Because rejection is part of making art and cannot be a reason to hit the gin bottle and avoid the studio!

So my art goals are simple. Make more. Submit more.

Self Portrait by Pippa Wardman

I love seeing the fabrics that my students print and dye during workshops - their work is so varied and inspirational. But I don’t often get to see what happens next - how they use their fabrics. I suspect that many pieces are put away in cupboards, but I hope that, at the very least, they get pulled out every so often and stroked lovingly. However earlier this autumn I asked my students to send me photos of work made using fabrics created here at Urban Studio North. And wow! The variety of work is amazing and I’m grateful for their help. I have put together a gallery of their work which can be accessed via the workshop page on my website. Have a look!

(And, whilst I’m here, a quick reminder that the last date you can place orders for delivery in the UK before Christmas is this Wednesday, the 15th.)

Stitched sample by Hilary Kimber using the selvedges from breakdown printed fabrics.

Although the last posting date is later I’m setting Wednesday 15th December as a cut off for pre-Christmas orders as I plan on taking a long break over Christmas and the New Year. Orders placed later than this will be posted at the start of January. (Unless I get a bit bored and fancy a trip to the Post Office!). I thought you might also like to know that I’ve added a few more new Wonky Print Inspiration Packs to my online shop.

I have now finished teaching for this year. The bad weather this week meant postponing the last two days teaching but other than that I’m happy, and relieved, to have been able to teach so many workshops this year. Despite the worries about the new variant we are much better place compared to this time last year. The rollout of vaccines has been amazing but I’m very grateful for the great attitude of all my students this year. We’ve worn masks, washed and sanitised hands, taken lateral flow tests and made sure that the studio has been a safe environment for all of us. Thank you to each and every one of year!

With no teaching scheduled until the end of January I can now turn all of my attention to making art. I’ve removed the plastic screens and re-arranged the benches to make the studio feel more ‘mine’. I’ve pinned all my ‘work in progress’ up on the design wall. And hidden the stock of chocolate biscuits so my beloved family can’t help themselves. Chocolate, and lots of strong coffee are an essential part of my creative process! The next quilt in the Cadence series is ready to quilt and I’ve got a completely new series in the development stage. So plenty to keep me busy!

Leah x