What a year!!

What a shock, the contents of my beautiful shed turned to a pile of charred, melted, scorched and coated with fire extinguisher powder unrecognisable objects!!!

So, now you know why I haven't been on my website for a while.

It all happened so quickly. At 10.30 am I was working away in my lovely shed and by 11.15 am it was a black hole of despair.

What caused it? I'm still unsure what caused it, however, I have a sneaky suspicion it was either my reading glasses or a magnifying glass I used for small stitch work. So beware!!!

The other shock was how much 'stuff' I had amassed over the years, sneaked in and squirrelled away. Thirty years of collecting textiles from all over the world, Peru, Vietnam, Thailand, lace from my Grandmother, precious items given to me by friends, a surprising number of textile books and lots and lots of sewing paraphernalia, shhh don't mention how many sewing machines I had!!

Lesson to be learnt, make sure you keep an inventory, even if it's a brief list of everything you have. Thank goodness my brother took photos or I would just never have even remembered half of what I had in my shed. A year later and I still go to find something and remember it's gone up in a pile of smoke.

Another lesson is make sure you have the right insurance. After an initial few months of to and fro with the insurance company they finally paid up and I will be forever grateful. If, you are running any kind of business, and thank goodness I wasn't, from your shed ensure you have the right cover.

I don't think I fully understood just how precious having my own space really was until I lost it.

Yes, there were my years of collections, yes there were pieces of my work which I will never be able to replace, however, the loss of space to sit think, create and 'just be' was devastating.

Now a year on, my shed is fully restored and I'm back creating. It's been a long journey and one I never want to be part of again.