Sea, seascapes, water in any form, has always been a thing that I have not really stitched on my Quilted Postcards. I have ‘played’ with a few ideas, back in 2010, I did a few postcards based on our holiday in Cornwall among them were Boscastle and Tintagel ones. Tony loves the sea, and I have tried to create ones for him, based on photos we have taken…..but I have never really been happy with how the water looks.

I have tried using different fabric, painting on the fabric to create movement and also colouring with wax crayons, then stitching on top. I have also just tried to paint the sea onto white fabric, using crayons, watercolours and also Inktense, none have really had the effect that I want. So, I have avoided making postcards with water in any form on it, which is a shame as we have so many photos that could be used as inspiration for designs.

I have always liked the old railway posters of the 1930’s and I started looking at these, how they created the images of landscapes, they are clean lined and often simplified. Then over the last couple of years I have started to look at Relief Prints – lino originally and then lately wood block, firstly landscapes, and then recently seascapes.

Relief prints for the most part are very pared back, in the colours used, and in the details, it’s the marks and lines that create the image that we read and understand.

I started to really look at the relief prints I liked and read a few books and articles on how the artist’s work. Understanding the process and the mark making.

It is not far to leap to take the ideas of the relief prints into fabric, already there are similarities between my fabric landscapes with the simplified shapes to those in the relief prints for hills, moors and fields. I then go on to add the details with my hand embroidery which can be more complicated than the marks used in relief prints, or at least in the simplified relief prints.

There are some very detailed relief prints, with lots of lines, and hours and hours of work, these often work in just a background colour and then the ink that it is printed in – a very limited colour range often black only. Here again I see a similarity with my drawings, I like just drawing with black fine liners, onto backgrounds of water colour washes or I will draw first and colour in with pencils.

Time disappears, it speeds past, and we are already a quarter of the way through 2025!

Since this time last year, I have felt the ticking of the clock, I am feeling the weight of the time left in my life, if I live to the average age for a woman in the UK, which is 82 years old then I have 25 more years. I am in the latter third of my life.

That doesn’t bother me, my life expectancy, the quality of my life is far more important. I want to live a life that I can do the things I want, not limited by aches, pain or other physical problems, I am already getting aching joints and this winter my hands have ached a lot, especially when they get cold. I want to be able to go out and walk, do the garden, cook and clean, I don’t want to be a burden on Tony or Laura – I am a person that looks after things not the other way round.

But this time last year, I changed my opticians and went to one with new up to date equipment, just thinking that I needed new glasses ….to be referred to a clinic for further tests and to be told that I have Fuch’s Endothelial Dystrophy – this is a degenerative disease of the cornea, basically the cells in my cornea are dying and eventually this will lead to very cloudy impaired vision, it happens over time, ten to fifteen years usually.

The solution is a cornea transplant. Although the sight loss is worrying, I felt it was some years off and I can adjust to this….what absolutely freaks me out is the solution….cornea transplant!!! I understand other organ transplants but cornea ones ….

And I was told I had severe Dry Eye, I had put my irritable eyes down to Hay Fever!!!

From the clinic I was transferred to the Ophthalmic unit of Queen’s Hospital, where I had more tests and the Fuch’s was confirmed, and I was told I had cataracts. I’m in my late 50’s, I really didn’t expect to be told I had cataracts, they are things people have in their late 60’s or 70’s!!!

So, I have FED, cataracts and Dry Eye…. and this is where it gets to be a problem. The FED or cataracts aren’t at this stage affecting my sight significantly, they can be left for some time but no one can tell me how long before that will change. The cataracts will most probably be the first to affect my sight but and here is the problem, I can’t go and have a straightforward cataract operation because of the FED. Operating on the cataracts will cause the cornea to deteriorate quicker. When the time comes for the cataracts to be operated on then I will need a combined cataract/transplant op. Ahhh…freak out!!! Something I have to consider is that there is a long waiting list for a transplant, so once it is decided that I need the cataracts operated on, then I will have to wait two/three years? then there is up to a year’s recovery and I will have to then have the second eye done, back on the waiting list etc – the whole thing could take five or more years.

I have got to find the right balance in all this, not leave it too long that my sight is totally compromised. Within that balance is my stitching and creativity, I can’t imagine life without creating.

I feel that the clock is ticking on how long I have to do some of the more detailed stitching I do, from the embroidery on the postcards to the hand quilting and hand stitching of hexagons – all those tiny stitches needed to sew them together and the cross stitch. I am feeling the weight of all those Unfinished projects and kits that I have in the workroom, and that is why I am trying to work on projects…

My sight deteriorating doesn’t scare me, that’s life, I will modify how and what I work on, I can still be creative, the large hole tapestry cushions, crochet, knitting and as Laura said I can take up painting in the style of Monet’s Waterlilies!!!!

The transplant does scare and freak me out!!! and yes everyone has talked to me about it, yes my sight will be restored but…..I am hoping that by the time I need the operation they will have got artificial corneas. They are in the trial stage of them at the moment.

That is where I am, not knowing how long till my sight becomes a problem, beyond the Dry Eye and the light sensitivity caused by the FED, I know we don’t know what is round the corner and we can’t see into the future. What will be will be…..

And on that note time to get back to stitching!!!

Something away from quilt making or being textile creative, gardening!!!! As it warms up and we have had a few nice warmer sunny days and it begins to feel like we are moving into early Spring then my thoughts turn to the garden, helped by all the plant catalogues that keep arriving.

I get the magazine Gardens Illustrated – it really has some stunning photography, I am a little behind in reading it and am on February’s edition, all about plants plus there is an article by Nigel Slater about plant catalogues and ‘dream time’ gardening and for him rose catalogues ‘page upon page of soft porn, a veritable 50 shades of pink’ !!!! oh, I know so what he means!!! I love the rose catalogues – especially the soft pink and white pages, the stunning photos of climbing roses and beds full of beautiful roses. Every few days emails from David Austen roses drop onto my screen – showing delicious roses…….then there are the Sarah Raven emails!!!

Oh, its so easy to be tempted to just click on the link and off I go to stare at beautiful plants in stunning settings, from blousy plants like cosmos, to spires of foxgloves & delphiniums, towers of sweet peas and then onto every hue of dahlias. Its all deliciously beautifully photographed in wonderful combinations and stunning arrays of colour, just to tempt us to buy. And don’t be tempted to look at the lifestyle section…..

It is the photography that is so inspiring!! And I am tempted by those, I guess you could call them ‘cottage garden’ flowers, the roses, foxgloves, hollyhocks, poppies, antirrhinums, eryngiums, hydrangeas, dahlias and chrysanthemums, and pelargoniums to name a few. My dream garden has a wide border filled with clipped yews or similar for year round structure and then a wonderful plants and flowers all mixed together, a stunningly painterly herbaceous border of the RHS or National Trust gardens.

As a teacher I feel that there is an expectation that I should create quilts that can be made either in a ten week term or possibly two terms but certainly finished within the whole of the teaching year – 30 weeks!!! Or maybe that’s just how I see it?!!!! The class is mixed abilities from those starting their patchwork & quilting journey through to very experienced, there are those that like machine work to others that only stitch by hand. And I have those that create beautiful quilt tops and then send them off to be professionally long arm quilted.

I design the quilts I make, I am influenced by traditional and historic designs but use modern techniques. Over thirty plus years of teaching I have designed and created soo many quilts, and I rarely go back to a previous design, just occasionally I will but mostly I am working on a new design. A design that takes into consideration all the abilities, likes and dislikes of the class. There is a lot to consider.

I could teach using other designers’ quilts and patterns, but that is not how I work. I often find quilt patterns difficult to understand, the way the instructions are written, I think its because I probably have dyslexia (I have never been formally tested but…) and I am not really interested in making other people’s designs, I really enjoy creating my own patterns.

My teaching has changed, before 2020 and lockdowns, I would often make and teach designs I wasn’t really very keen on, they were things that I was asked to show. During the lockdowns I recalibrated my quilt making (and I wrote about this at the time), but life never stands still and things constantly change. At the end of 2024, I took stock, and as I have written in the first Ramble of 2025 I have recalibrated and come up with The Plan.

One of my U.F.O’s (UnFinished Objects) is the Textile Scrapbook. It’s probably best to start with a bit of background on the project - it was started back in the early part of 2024,so it’s not a really old project. I taught how to make the cover and one set of pages. It then got put to one side when I moved onto the next teaching project. I always meant to carry on making the pages and had a whole bag of bits that I wanted to use, but I just never got round to doing it. For a few months it was on my weekly list to do but then….I stopped writing it on and it got pushed further to the back of the pile!!!

2025 is the year that I am going to finish a few of my U.F.O’s, I have picked up a Tilda Charm Pack Quilt to do and also the pages of the Textile Scrapbook. In January I finished making one pair of pages and stitched together another page, which I am quietly stitching away on.

The pages are made up of one main piece - a sample piece of patchwork or applique, or embroidery or a repurposed cross stitch, round this I am machine piecing oddments of fabric to create a 9½” square – one page!!! This is stabilised with a medium weight interfacing and then I hand stitch on top. Sometimes I work one page at a time, others I make up a pair of pages.

I have no plan. I just find stranded embroidery threads from my large collection that match or compliment and then stitch. It can be simple lines of running stitch across, or hearts or flowers, just using my favourite simple stitches of running, stem stitch, chain or blanket and of course French knots.

Hello, January 2025, it’s a couple of weeks in and I have had time to settle into the month and year!

I don’t ever make New Years resolutions, but I do find that the twixmas time is good for thinking and working out what I want from the coming year and not make resolutions but to make plans – write lists and more lists and set goals and tasks, work out what I want to do.

Lets go back to the second half of last year, I had got out of a lot of my good creative habits, I hadn’t been doing half hour cross stitch each day, or monthly dressmaking days, they had all fallen by the way side! The only habit I had kept was my 10 minute daily colouring & drawing. I felt that I wasn’t really getting anything done – I had become negative and not focused on my creativity and frustrated at trying to fit everything in. I was still making, Sunbonnet Sue ideas for teaching and quilted zipped pouches for presents and a few other little bits.

We went on a lovely relaxing cruise just before Christmas and I did NO stitching, a little bit of Granny Square crochet, daily drawing, lots of walking and reading and thinking……working out a plan for how I could balance looking after two houses, laundry & cooking with creativity. And balancing all the bits of creativity from teaching ideas and plans, to cross stitching, working on Un Finished Objects (U.F.O’s) both hand and machine pieces, dressmaking, to developing ideas and patterns to sell, to making Quilted Postcards and thinking about writing a fifth book!!!!

So much to do!!! And not a great deal of time to do it all.

As we headed to the start of January I had a plan, one that I hoped would work. I had a nice new bigger sized planner for all the house side of things – my lovely, years old, leather personal size Filofax just was no longer big enough to write everything for looking after two houses in, for 2025 I have gone over to an A5 planner – more space to write more lists and be very organised!!! And of course I have my creative planner as well!!!
Caring for the family and cooking are everyday things, these form the start of the day and the end of the afternoon. Housework has its set time, our house Monday morning, Wednesday, and half hour Friday morning, then Maurice’s housework is the rest of Friday morning.

The rest of Monday is getting everything ready for class on Tuesday, picking bits up and sorting my bags. Then working on U.F.O’s either hand or machine bits, depending on how I feel. At the moment the hand bit is pages for my Textile Scrapbook, and for the machine is making the borders for a Tilda Charm pack quilt. This is the first U.F.O quilt to be worked on and finished, there are loads more to do afterwards, the list is long, from Laura’s rose quilt which is mostly hand quilting, to my everyday objects quilt again hand quilting, to Nine Patch scrap one to all those sitting in the boxes, hidden away from sight!!!