My view this morning - my first big frost.  We don't get a lot of frost or snow here.   Happy New Year!!!  I hope you are all well and have managed to get to this point unscathed by the dreaded flu bug that has been doing the rounds. You have my sympathy if you did succumb to it's miserable advances. After all the high winds of recent days, things are calm for a while - it is a glorious day, a good day to start getting sorted for the rest of the year. As usual my year is basically planned already. A bit of teaching, a few shows and visits from friends are all in the diary. It is good to know that you have lots of different activities coming up throughout the year. It helps give structure to your life. The strangest thing in my diary is having book out days for my business partner Jayne to come over to Ireland and film the videos for the online teaching. Seeing 'Jayne/filming' on a page always makes me smile - who would have thought. After all these year...

Oyster catcher feathers from my local bay. I have lived in Ireland for a year now - and I can safely say it is the best thing I have ever done. It was a big leap from Brighton, but so worth it. Where I live now is so very quiet, so different to where I lived in Brighton. I have made great friends here and have been accepted by the local community.  It has taken this long for me to find my reason for being here in this beautiful place. Which direction my work is going to go - I have fallen in love with seaweed and have become quite passionate about clearing our local beach of plastic. I never felt I could make any kind of  difference while living on the South Coast of the U.K. Here on this remote tip of County Clare I feel I can make a small difference. Ross Bay on a very chilly afternoon. My house is on the hill.    As the tide goes out, it leaves behind beautiful compositions. I just love the layers of seaweed.   Playing wit...

A section taken across 3 Journeys. I have reached a rather exciting and rewarding time in my own personal journey. My teaching journey. Whilst I am known for my development of surfaces to stitch onto, the course I am most pleased with is the course I wrote and developed - Experimental Textiles. It started off as a 1 year course - but my students wouldn't go away - so I wrote another year . . then another year. In the end it became a 4 year course up to diploma level. At one stage I was teaching it across 2 colleges and managing 3 first year groups, 3 second year groups . . and so on. The waiting lists were so long we had to put on extra nights and in the case of the 4th year - Saturdays.  This of course was in the days when Adult Education was properly funded. When you could write and develop your own courses. I taught the 4 year version of Experimental Textiles for 12 years. I had to stop in the end as I no longer had a life!! I thought I would never want to teach a...