“I AM INCAPABLE OF MAKING THE SAME THING TWICE”

As the daughter of a designer / pattern maker I grew up surrounded by textiles, with my mother often on the sewing machine at home making clothes for myself, my friends and our dolls.  Surrounded as I was by this, I learnt how to get the best out of a sewing pattern and piece of fabric early on, and this became a very important part of my life.

During my secondary school years I became fascinated by the burgeoning contemporary embroidery of the 60’s and 70’s, but although fostering my interest, my family did not allow me to further that interest at the London College of Fashion; instead insisting on a Business qualification. However my love of sewing in its different forms have stayed with me throughout my life.

Like many I am visually stimulated and drawn to interesting, colour enhancing objects, especially textiles; being unable to resist finding and collecting these textiles and trimmings at every opportunity, resulting in my workroom floor strewn with areas of individual colourful, and quirky fabrics, in small piles of ‘soon to be made-up’ pieces slowly accumulating – I can never ‘make’ as quickly as I need to; the ideas never stop. 

So from embroidery, dressmaking, knitting, tapestry, curtains and cushions, quilts and even book binding, I have continued to take pleasure from using these various materials to make interesting artefacts.

My Fabrics

As an obsessive collector of textiles, trimmings and everything related to them – in the form of  remnants, ends of rolls, often from markets and other places, sometimes new garments in a sale taken apart and re-purposed - wherever I am; often while on holiday, as in the Maldives some years ago (where much to the amusement of my fellow travellers, I managed to find fabrics on two of the interesting, unsophisticated and sparsely populated islands in the North Atoll).  And now (if we look that is) we can see the resulting tsunami of waste from our over production of cheap clothing littering the coasts and countries of West Africa and India among others, so through the re-purposing of these fabrics, trimmings and patterns I am inspired to make eclectic one-off garments for young children.