It’s been a while since my last studio update, from my previous posts you will see that I’m back in my newly refurbished studio. It’s great to have my own space back and I’m enjoying having the room to work on bigger projects. I’ve been taking inspiration from my surroundings, our walks in the North Yorkshire Moors National Park and the Yorkshire Coast. I feel very lucky to live in such a fantastic location where I can feel so inspired.

I’ve been working a new stitchscape inspired by a walk around May Beck in the spring, As I started to develop the piece this week I decided to change to the scale and edge of the work. I usually make pieces that cover the fabric but I really like the raw edges and random shapes so I’m using them as a feature. The work has also been scaled up and I’m working in an 18-inch quilting hoop, I usually work on a smaller scale so this is a new challenge.

I’m replicating the details from the smaller piece, using different scraps of fabric and a mixture of DMC Cotton Perle threads. This gives the piece a great texture and I’ve stabilised the fabric with an iron on interfacing to make sure that it doesn’t pucker under the dense stitching.

On a recent trip to Fraisthorpe Beach, I collected some fragments of shell and driftwood. The beach had more shells than I’ve seen before, I could have brought them all back to the studio with me. It’s important to remember to wash anything you find on the beach, it can start to smell or bring unwanted wildlife with it, not that this has happed to me before!

I’ve been looking for inspiration for a new miniature worlds piece and one of the shells I found was just right. I thought it would be interesting to stitched the shell onto a piece of thick wool fabric, this took me a bit longer than I thought. I’m now adding beaded detail using a variety of seed beads in greys, silvers and whites. It’s a slow process and the shell is hard to stitch around so this piece might take a while.

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