It all started with a princess and a pea...
Well, in truth it started a while before that. A close friend had shown me how it was possible to draw with the sewing machine using freestyle embroidery and I'd quickly come to love turning my life drawings into thread drawings on calico and linen. One of the first was Ms Stripey Socks....
...with her needle felted rainbow socks and sketchy thread drawn pose of wanton self love she quickly became a firm favourite amongst my close circle of women. Within a few years she was surrounded by a gallery full of expressive thread women in my very first solo exhibition at Kingston Arts Centre - "Fabric of Life"
But how does The Princess and the Pea come into it? Well, one day I was making this quite large Princess and the Pea textile piece (because I love that fairy tale and I just couldn't resist all those mattresses) but in order to make the large one I had to first make a small one as a mock up, or a prototype, or in sculpture we'd call it a maquette, anyway whatever we call it it's a small version, sketchy and quicker to execute and its purpose is to work out the design before launching into the big one and wasting all your fabrics by getting it all wrong. Once I'd done the small Princess and the Pea I started thinking it would be nice to make thread sketches of more of my larger designs, but even smaller and frame them so that they are nice little affordable art pieces.
And that's how the Thread Sketch Collection came to be.