About Me!

I'm a textile artist and I live in Falmouth, Cornwall with my husband Martin. We live five minutes from the sea and I get a lot of my inspiration from the sea and beautiful countryside around us. We have two children, Caroline and Andrew. Caroline is a jeweller in London and Andrew works and lives  in Edinburgh.  I studied at Ravensbourne College of Art and Design in Bromley for my degree in Textiles and History of Art.
When I was first married I started my own business designing and making clothes which was fun but wasn't what I wanted to do. I was also teaching embroidery and dyeing which was much more to my liking!

When the children were born my husband decided
to go farming and for seventeen years we had a dairy farm with Jersey cows. I was kept very busy then, especially when we started manufacturing dairy products such as clotted cream and yogurt. But when we left the farm I wanted to get back into textiles full time and so I started to teach in the Adult Education programme and eventually taught embroidery and patchwork for the City and Guilds 7900 Creative Studies Certificate.  I continued to do my own work designing,  making textile pictures and dyeing threads and fabric. Then I started to develop my hobby of Crazy Patchwork. I joined a Crazy Patchwork list and through this made many friends worldwide.  This led to my selling my dyed ribbons and Crazy Patchwork packs via my website and having an article published in Workbox  magazine which all led to more exciting things!  My one of a kind hand-dyed fabrics have been a success and I am now expanding that aspect of my business! I am no longer selling hand-dyed silk ribbon as I no longer have time to do all the things I want to do and teach. I can highly recommend Vickie Clayton of Hand Dyed Fibers.com for silk ribbon and threads.

In July of 2000 I was in America where I taught some dyeing and silk ribbon classes at the Crazy Quilt Conference in Omaha, Nebraska, USA. This was a wonderful time for me and I learnt so much.  I went back to America for the Fibre Arts Conference organised by Vickie Tobin of Pepperell Pepper Patch in October 2002. I was also teaching at the Crazy Quilt Festival in Bourboule, France in September 2002 and September 2003! This improved my french immeasurably. It was a very busy and exciting time for me! Since then I have been staying at home so that I can get some work done as well as running workshops in dyeing and machine embroidery!

Dyeing continues to be my main focus of interest and I have also found a lot of enjoyment in fabric painting and colouring with fabric pens, oil pastels and wax paintstiks.

 

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Some Examples of My Work             

Machine Embroidery

contact@farnedesigns.co.uk