Well hello there!
In this newsletter I’d like to cordially invite you to join my friend Katriona Chapman and I as we share our recent hiking adventures through daily vlogs. I’m also introducing three new goodies that I designed this year which have now arrived in my shop.
At the end of September, my good friend Kat agreed to a multi-day, long distance hike with me to celebrate my 40th birthday. Being both artists and vloggers, we couldn’t let the adventure pass without recording it, and since our walk finished we’ve both been hard at work creating daily videos to share the journey with you.
So that you can enjoy the adventure with us in “real time”, we’ve decided to publish the videos one-per-day, each summarising one day of the hike. This will begin on Monday 6th November at 8:00pm GMT, with a double bill! First you’ll be able to watch our Preparations video on Kat’s channel, and that will be followed at 8:35pm GMT on my channel with the very first day’s hike (if you click through now, you’ll find a trailer to whet your appetite!).
We’ll both be there during the premieres to live chat as you watch along. But even if you miss the launch, after Monday the videos will be available there for you to enjoy, with a new one going up at the same time, 8:00pm GMT, every day for the rest of the week.
Editing these vlogs has been like living the adventure all over again, and honestly I can't stop watching them, they make me grin from ear to ear. I really hope you'll enjoy watching and walking along with us. It has been a joy to collaborate with Kat on such a huge project, both the walking and the videos, and we’re really hoping we can do some more like this in the future.
We have grand plans to walk The Beacons Way, which is the route we intended to follow this time, but you’ll soon see that didn’t quite work out. We’re also hoping to spend a week beginning the South West Coast Path next year - vlogging the whole way of course!
As if the excitement of launching these videos wasn’t enough, I’ve also got some new pieces in my shop. I spent several months earlier in the year creating this scratchboard piece (which you can watch in podcast episode 59) depicting ten crafty sheep hard at work on their knitting, crochet and spinning. I wanted a new piece to complement my British Sheep Breeds tea towel design, and I’m so pleased with how this one turned out.
If you’re not familiar, scratchboard is a drawing surface made from a layer of china clay (white) overlaid with Indian ink (black), which you scratch away with a stylus to create white marks. It’s like drawing with black ink in reverse. It’s slow and meticulous, and is a great medium for creating textures and details - like wool and knitted jumpers!
My tea towels are screen printed here in the UK, and each one is individually wrapped by hand in my studio. The sheep breed tea towels were among the very first products in my shop when I relaunched in 2019, so it feels very special to be able to add these crafty sheep as a companion piece to it now.
I’ve also got two new enamel pins to share with you. First, I feel it was long overdue to introduce a sheep pin to my shop! In fact I don’t know how I left it so long. I knew this sheep needed to be wearing a marvellously coloured rainbow jumper, and that I wanted the pin to appeal to anyone who works with wool; not just knitters, but crocheters and spinners too.
The second new pin is basically a self portrait: a foraging frog wearing dungarees, standing amidst a patch of red mushrooms. This design grew out of an unfinished painting from earlier this year. I firmly believe there are no failures when it comes to making art, and this friend made it clear they just needed to be an enamel pin and not a painting after all.
You can watch the process of developing both of these designs in podcast episode 64. Just like my tea towels, my enamel pins are made in the UK. They come with a black rubber clutch and they’re embossed on the back with my little logo.
Now as the nights get longer and the weather gets colder, I’m hoping to return to the comforts of my yarn crafts. I’ve struggled this summer with a loss of interest in many of my crafts, but I think the necessity of adding a few more warm jumpers to my wardrobe might just see me picking up the needles more often again…
Thank you so much for being here, reading, watching and supporting my work. I hope you love these new offerings as much as I’ve enjoyed creating them.
Jack (who celebrated his 13th birthday this month!) says hi!