We Love You Ray

Tomorrow evening, we are going to see Ray Lamontagne playing at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester and I am SO excited! I have seen him twice before and he is amazing. Each performance is full of raw energy and his songs connect so strongly with me. Last time he even made me cry!

Ray isn't big on "chatting" to the audience and is quite reserved. Last time I saw him, he remained almost deadpan when a male member of the audience bellowed "We love you Ray" and "Marry me Ray" in a strong Mancunian accent!

He doesn't like to tell the history of a song as he believes that the song should retain mystery and be meaningful to the each person who listens to it. Along with his band, he seems to give every performance his all!

I'm also looking forward to seeing the support acts as there has been some great talent amongst them, in particular Priscilla Ahn who has the voice of an angel.

La Vie en Rose

Mr Dotty and I usually have an agreement that we won't "do" Valentine's day, preferring to express our romantic side when we choose. However, when I went upstairs to get dressed after Mr D had left for work this morning, I was surprised and delighted to find this sweet little music box on my pillow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONwwsCwSuBs


I love this tune and had admired the music box in Fred Aldous recently. I don't know when he managed to sneak back to buy it!

He's a good'un!!

Vibrant and Fragrant

My house smells gorgeous at the moment as I've been making more lavender sachets.
I love the uplifting colours of this one.

The fabric was printed with an image of graffiti, before I cut it into hexagons. I never really know how the end product will turn out and enjoy experimenting with the position of  the templates on the fabric to  produce abstract patterns.

You may be able to see which parts of the original image were used.

Trip To Salford

My study room is piled with carefully packaged textile artwork at the moment. Tomorrow I am delivering the work to Salford Museum and Art Gallery for the Ten Plus Textiles group retrospective exhibition. The preview is on Saturday and I am really excited about it.

There are 16 members in the group and we have each put in around 4 pieces of work, spanning our time in the group, including a new piece each. There will also be some art  from associate members. Our work covers many textile arts, including beadwork, patchwork, mixed media, batik,quilting and weaving. It is very varied and wonderfully colourful.

More details about the group can be found here: http://www.tenplustextiles.com/

Collaboration

Mr Dotty has had a couple of days off from his day job and has been out and about taking photographs. We have thousands of his images stored on a hard drive and it is a great source of inspiration.

I have really been enjoying using some of the images he has taken directly in my work, combining traditional English patchwork (hand stitched over papers) with bright, urban images.

This is the original image

This is what I did with it