Wibbly Wobbly Houses

On Monday I helped to take down the TenPlus Textiles exhibition (www.tenplustextiles.com) at Salford Art Gallery. The exhibition had gone very well with lots of visitors, positive feedback and sales. I was really pleased to find that I had sold 2 pieces.

This piece, called "Fairy Glen" is one that sold. The fabric is painted and printed with newspaper, the cottages and rocks are appliqued and all the detail is added by machine and hand stitching. I don't know who the buyer is, but I hope the picture brings them lots of joy!

I now have to busy myself making new pieces for our group exhibition at the Knitting and Stitching shows in the Autumn. I am developing the idea of cottages where fairies might live and continuing to use text. I have introduced lots of curved lines and moved away from black and white, by using lots of colour.

This is a sneak preview of the first piece, which I have just finished. There are 2 more in the pipe-line. You can just see some written text on the houses, which comes from a letter that my Nan sent me over 20years ago. In the letter she talks about her love of the countryside and her wish to stay in a cottage, which she didn't really get the opportunity to do. I really wanted to incorporate the letter, so I used Photoshop to remove the lines from the paper it was written on, then printed it, painted it and reprinted it onto fabric. Tomorrow I'll show you a little more of the letter.