It’s been a quiet start in our little house to this new decade. Much of December and all of January so far has been a blur of illness as one child or other, or me, has succumbed to the coughs, colds and winter infections that fly about so freely as this time of year. We’ve…Read more »

I’ve always loved it when the thirteenth day of the month falls on a Friday. Friday 13th, despite the negative patriarchal influence, has always been a positive day for me. Maybe somewhere in my DNA, there is the remembrance of the feminine importance of 13. The number of the divine feminine, representative of the thirteen…Read more »

My email inbox has been full to the brim this last week with Black Friday deals. On books, on haberdashery supplies, on just about anything you can imagine. Those of you who have followed my business for a while, might remember that last year I shut-up-shop for Black Friday weekend in protest against the consumerist…Read more »

I have often wondered when it was that Western society collectively decided that visibly mended clothes were a mark of reduced status. Of a life worth less. Where a patch or a darn was certainly not acceptable in polite company. Many cultures across the globe value and respect the energy that is used to create…Read more »

  I first learnt to cut and stitch patchwork sitting on the living room floor of family friend Barbara Thompson. Walking into her house, there was always the aroma of cooking spices, books, wool. The walls were covered in bookshelves, almost as though her house was built with stories, not bricks, and the books that didn’t…Read more »

It’s been a bit quiet on the blog these last few weeks. I’ve been struggling to write about the tiny, small efforts we are making at home, because I haven’t felt particularly inspired by them, in the great whirl of Extinction Rebellion protests, and the darkening knowledge of what is happening across the planet. The…Read more »

When I first moved into the house I live in now, there was an elder sapling in my back garden, brought by birds, and shooting up rebelliously between honeysuckle and philadelphus. The garden was very different then – with only two previous owners, both strong independent women who loved to garden,  it had neat hedges,…Read more »