I love winter!

I love this time of year. Christmas has been and gone, it's so quiet in the village that I only open the shop on a saturday, which means that the rest of the week I have the wonderful luxury of being able to 'play' with new ideas. Yippee! Cards are such good sellers, and it's nice to present something to the customer that they would never find on the high street. Whenever I'm making anything with textiles, all the cut ends of threads and every teeny, tiny scrap of discarded fabric gets put into this old sweet jar. This range of cards came about as a way of using up all those scrap ends - nothing gets thrown away here!

I have used old will documents as the background for each heart. The bits of thread and fabric are randomly scattered all over the document and sealed with a layer of glued tissue paper - a tricky process! After drying, I use various sized heart templates to draw the heart shapes and then cut them out. Each heart is then sewn directly onto the front of each card. A little linen button with a hand-stitched 'x' adds the final finishing touch.

Butterflies are a favourite theme of mine at the moment. By cutting out the butterfly images and then only sticking down the centre section you can bend their wings up and make them appear as if they are just alighting! Although these cards are printed, each one remains entirely unique as I am feeding the paper into the printer by hand several times to achieve a layering of text and pattern. The fabric I have printed from in this instance is a lovely 1930's floral.

It makes nice gift tags too!

I love to use old sepia toned photographs in my work.

The same girl appears in both these photographs, and I have more from the same album. She's always smiling, a very cheery sort!

A beautiful French 19th c fabric forms the background for this group.

Thanks for stopping by!