I was chatting with a sewing friend not too long ago (hi Gabby :)) about what we did before we discovered garment sewing and it occurred to me that I’ve always been crafting! Often, I hear other sewists reminisce about their childhood and how they learned how to sew from their family members – their…
Tutorial: Block Printed Kitchen Towels
Serves 6–8 I have fond memories of cooking kedgeree at St John Bread and Wine. An Anglo-Indian dish of boiled rice, eggs and smoked haddock tumbled together. The aromas of steaming basmati rice subtly spiked with cinnamon, cardamom and cloves and of haddock fillets poaching in a milky bath tinted orange from saffron all created…
Hot, wild pinks like RED TRAVIATA were part of British contemporary painter Howard Hodgkin’s vocabulary for decades. He swept passages of daring pink across his huge paintings – and even onto the surrounding frames – in large, gestural strokes, nestling them in amongst an unlikely array of ultramarine blues, acid greens or deep ochre yellows….
Double gauze and I have a love-hate relationship. I love to wear it, hate to sew it, and I just can’t quit it. I find most of my issues with trying to navigate the notoriously lovely cloud-like wrinkled texture when choosing a size to cut, pressing, interfacing, deciding to prewash or not, buttonhole disasters etc. And this is where…
Today of all days, my biggest act of love is self-love. And self-love today is clearing away a situation and feelings that have been holding me back for years. My therapist always insisted that letting go is best done either through boxing or writing, today, I choose the latter. As an immigrant divorcee, I reluctantly but in…
Continuing on from Five Useful Pleats and Folding Techniques, Three Useful Hem Techniques, How To Sew Your Most Essential Four Pockets and How To Sew Your Most Essential Four Collars article, here are five useful ways you can fasten your trousers, skirts and dresses with. Simply click on the links below to either go straight to the hem…
British painter and printmaker Gillian Ayres took the 20th century British art world by storm, creating wild and energised abstract paintings with all colours of the rainbow. Blue was one of her favourites, particularly grey-tinged shades of blue like BLUESTONE, for their ability to convey the illusion of sky or water sweeping through her vast…
The quilters of Gee’s Bend have achieved worldwide recognition for transforming the act of quilting into an artform, one which they have passed from generation to generation over the past 200 years. Their work is now held in museums worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum and the Smithsonian. But it is only in recent years, thanks…
Pioneering American artist Georgia O’Keeffe made a significant and long-lasting contribution to the history of art, with a daring new language of spare, stark simplicity that foreshadowed minimalist abstraction. Her mid-20th century art was an ode to nature and the wide-open space of the American outback, with its pale, bleached colours, huge skies and undulating…
Beeswax Food Wraps. The idea occurred to me that these food wraps would be a very cute Valentine Gift with a little card and treat. I have heard so much about these food wraps as a more sustainable option than cling-wrap or plastic wrap for food storage. I have seen some cute ones in shops…
Tell us a bit about yourself and what you do. My name is Monica, and I’m 26 and live in London. I am originally from Canada but moved to the UK for grad school and decided to stay as I love the place so much. I work as an architectural assistant and am working towards my final…
Artemisia Gentileschi was the foremost female painter of the 17th century, working for prestigious clients across Rome, Florence, Venice and Naples. Like many painters of the Baroque era, her art was dark, brooding, and mysterious, telling tales of martyred women from throughout history with theatrical, directional lighting and indulgently painted fabrics. She often coupled earthy…
Hungarian-Indian painter Amrita Sher-Gil lived a short but immensely prolific life. Despite her untimely death at the age of 28, she had already produced hundreds of daring, Realist paintings that documented ordinary Indian women in a way like never before, portraying them preparing for weddings, at home, or in moments of private solitude and melancholy….
Serves 4 The Parsis in India were an industrious community. During British rule, many left their small villages and came to the large cities to work alongside the British and Dutch, facilitating trade with the locals for sail making, fabric weaving, tea growing and even opium from China. Parsis being great cooks and having a…
Glowing shades of pale yellow like GOLDEN GRAIN were a recurring feature in much of the Dutch-French Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh’s art. But nowhere more so than in his late series of wheat fields, which convey the low-lying autumn sunlight casting its warm radiance across the vast wheat fields that once dominated the south…
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