France

I have been living in the France, firstly in the Alps and now in the Charente Maritime, since 2001 and have been actively involved with Patchwork since 2003. I have always been attracted to fabric and arrived at Patchwork via dressmaking and soft furnishings, the latter I ran as a business for about 12 years. I am a trained teacher and have always fitted some teaching in with everything that I have done and love teaching textiles. I have recently stopped teaching English but I still do a small amount of translation. After tearing  myself away from walking in the Alps (also a passion) to go to the FOQ for the first time, I was blown away and really motivated so I joined the Quilter’s Guild Contemporary Group. I have always tinkered on my own with the odd course with the local France patchwork group but I yearned for more, most quilting groups around me were, and still are, traditional in their approach and I wanted to know more. So I signed up to do a City and Guilds diploma, which I finished in 2014, because I wanted to be more efficient in my approach to textile art, focus myself and hopefully to make my results more professional. Recently I have tried to narrow down the techniques I use to  focus on producing a more coherent collection of work.  From time to time I get itchy feet and head off to discover anther part of the world. My travels, and walking here in France, are a great inspiration for my work and I often use photographs I have taken as my starting point.