It’s been almost half a year since I last posted here – how did that happen?!
Time flies I guess and I have been very busy, putting my focus on my family, our home and finding a new direction with my work. So it is certainly time that we had a good old catch up and I will fill you in on everything that has been happening in my life, during 2026.
Way back near the start of the year, I made the decision to put my baskets to one side for now. I had been struggling to keep things going with the changes to social media, changes to selling work overseas and not being able to find gallery representation that suited my work.
I applied for a few opportunities at the end of 2025, but when none of them worked out and the bills at home were mounting up, I felt that I had to make a change. It can be incredibly lonely trying to earn a living from things that you make from your heart. As a self-taught, full-time home educating mum, fitting work around my commitments at home, I have found that there is very little help out there, to actually find ways to get your work seen and hopefully find homes for it.
It was a difficult decision in many ways, but one that I had been building up to for months and I know that my baskets will be there waiting for me, whenever I want to pick up where I left off.
At the time, my thoughts were to explore my interests in other areas of textiles and hopefully make some things that would find homes more easily locally, rather than across the globe. Right now, I don’t think that I’ve made a lot of progress there. I think perhaps the trouble is that I like to make things from my heart, like it is a gift to a friend or loved one. So the projects take as long as they take and an enormous amount of time and care is poured into each one. So perhaps teaching will end up being the answer for me, passing on my passion and ideas to help others find the joy in making. Right now, I’m still as clueless as I was at the beginning of the year!
While nothing has changed in that respect, there have been plenty of other changes going on. I have always loved sewing, since very early in childhood, but all of those hours, months and years spent working on my baskets, have given me a new confidence in my abilities to make things with fabric and stitches.
That’s the great thing about working with your hands, the more you make, the more you know how to make! Those skills, the muscle memory, the ability to see something in your mind and turn into an actual thing – it’s all transferrable. So that when you pick up a new craft or revisit an old one, you find that you progress with speed.
I’m really pleased with the pieces that I’ve made so far this year. I’ve been able to explore visual storytelling and making use of repurposed materials and scraps. All things that I was turning my mind towards in my basketry practice, so that for me it seems like a continuous practice rather than a change of direction.
I have made wallhangings, vessels and most recently a little hand-stitched book. I will write up a post on the book later this week, because although it is only small, it turned out to be a pretty big project!
Away from the studio corner, life has been storming along as it always does when you have a busy household!
Two of my Five in the Nest are preparing to leave home, to continue their studies at University; my Father-in-Law is preparing to follow us in moving from Cornwall to the East Coast of Scotland, so that we can be nearby; my oldest is busy working on her own creative practice and teaching kids ceramics; my 16 year old is stretching out childhood as long as she possibly can, but reluctantly turning her thoughts to the future and our sweet little Wren is living her best life, as always!
Matt and I have committed ourselves to paying off the debts from our last move, to put us all in a stronger financial position, because with the world the way it is right now, that seems really important. It’s tricky on a very modest income, but there are always changes that you can make, you just have to look for them, and we have!
Thankfully I reached out for help from my GP, with my health, earlier in the year. I had been quite unwell for some time, but was struggling on, on my own.
The cause of the problem turned out to be Adenomyosis, which had been causing havoc with my monthly cycle and as well as causing me a great deal of pain, had meant that I had become very anaemic.
After months of iron tablets, and doing my own research on diets to help balance my hormones, I feel totally transformed! I am able to go on long walks with my kids again and I am busy working on turning a large part of our garden into a productive food garden – to help with never-ending rise in the cost of living!
If you are struggling with your monthly cycle (or fortnightly, as it was in my case) or with heavy bleeding, I can’t urge you enough to seek help. It isn’t something that you have to just bare and wait for menopause. I waited far too long and I am very grateful to be feeling so much better now.
So that’s the catch up. Life is looking pretty good. It keeps me guessing and just when I think that I can relax a little, something else comes along, that needs puzzling out, but I have my health, I just celebrated 26 years of being married to my best friend and I get to spend my days seeing my children grow and start building their own lives.
