Heaven equals lolling on the sofa reading textile books

There are worse ways to spend a cold and damp evening. I've just been reading through my textile book pile searching for info on the wall hanging I acquired in Glastonbury. Check out the Restoration Project page for where I am up to.

Part of my growing collection of books on textiles.

My favourite resource books are:

Sheila Payne's Embroidered Textiles and John Gillow's World Textiles which has interesting sections on techniques.

The book I anticipate using the most for this project is Indian Textiles by John Gillow and Nicholas Barnard.

Ok I admit it I spend more time drooling over the pictures than reading. Then when I ran out of images to slobber on in the books I searched Google for some more.

I am such a sparkle junkie!

Welcome

Here it is, another Tribal Geek blog, this time to share my passion for all things textiles.

On this blog I hope to share my projects and things which inspire me and keep me occupied when I'm not dancing.

I got into textiles by accident. Having absolutely loathed sewing and the like at school I avoided anything to do with yarn or embroidery until my early twenties. Then a backpacking trip round Ireland introduced me to Irish crochet and I was hooked.

Sadly the ability to crochet left me when I crossed the sea back to England (weird! I know) but I still enjoyed messing round with yarn and took up knitting instead.

About 10 years ago I got involved with historical re-enactment and discovered that I could sew after all. Having made all my kit by hand I was overcome with the urge to decorate it, so taught myself to embroider and tablet weave. Then I decided that buying yarn wasn't authentic enough for me so I learnt to spin with a drop spindle and played around with natural dyes to get some colour into the yarns I was making.

Now that my life has been taken over by Tribal Bellydance I have extended my passion into ethnic textiles and I have learnt mirror embroidery, tassel making, beading etc so that I can restore or create costume pieces to add to my dance dowry.

There are so many things I want to make or recreate but sadly I have a butterfly brain and tend to flit from one thing to another. My craft room is full of unfinished projects and things that will be 'useful for something' so hopefully writing this blog will help me to focus and finish what I start.

So if you see me add another project page before the last one is done shout at me.