Where do I start …..

• Thank you to my wonderful friends and students who came to my open studio events. Especially Jane for her lovely gift and Geraldine who bought a very impressive and delicious cake. Thank you for buying art, fabric, jigsaws and books and for raising £63 for The Trussell Trust. And a very big thank you to Sharon who has found a home for those old quilts that would otherwise be heading for the recycling centre.

• Thank you to all the artists who volunteered to demonstrate and help in the Creative Textile Studio at Festival of Quilts. Hazel, Terry and myself really do appreciate the amount of time and cost that you spend to support the Studio. Couldn’t do it without you!

• Thank you to everyone who visited the Creative Textile Studio. I absolutely love introducing so many people to breakdown printing! Great questions, great comments. And thank you for buying my books and fabric from the sales table …. none of us get paid to set up the Studio or to work in the Studio so sales are always welcome.

• Thank you to the quilt judges who awarded Shoreline l (above) 2nd prize in the Art category. Shoreline ll was shortlisted for the awards. Such a positive response to new work is very empowering. I wasn’t sure if the muted colour palette would work but now my head is full of ideas on how to take the series forward.

Phew, it’s been a full on couple of weeks! In other news … we lost our buyer but within a week we had had 4 viewings and 3 offers so the big house move is back on! We’re not going to do any packing for a while which means that I have lots of free time to work in the studio. Time to get some ideas out of my head and onto fabric. Happy days!

A busy few days in the studio as I prepare for two upcoming events! Festival of Quilts and my upcoming workshops in Telluride, Colorado.

Yes it is Festival of Quilts time again. Where did the year go?? I’m not having a stand this year because of the house move but I will be demonstrating in The Creative Textile Studio on the mornings of Thursday 31st July and Friday 1st August and on the afternoon of Sunday 3rd August. This is the fourth year that myself and Hazel and Terry from InStitches have been organising the Studio and we are a well oiled machine! We each have our designated roles and a well tested packing list. I supply all the dyes, print paste, screens, squeegees and other stuff. So I’ve been busy mixing litres of print paste followed by thickened dyes. I’ve made six breakdown printing screens to use when demonstrating. I’ve also been getting some fabric packs ready to sell on the sales table. There won’t be many so if you fancy a Wonky Inspiration Print Pack you might want to visit the Studio early! We have a wonderful collection of artists demonstraing this year. You can find the timetable and more about each artist by clicking here.

(The Studio is a free feature within the show so the ‘book tickets’ button on the page is for buying tickets for the whole show).

Although it isn’t until the end of September I have been making colour blankets to take with me. I bought small quantities of each of the eight US sourced dyes we will be using during the two five day workshops to make them. I selected the colours online, trying to match as closely as possible to the eight colours (6 co-primaries + black + dark brown) that I use in my studio. Hmmm … so the colours on a screen don’t always match the exact colours that you get. I know this. I even have this disclaimer in my online shop. But it is always a pleasant / not so pleasant surprise …..I haven’t rinsed and washed the blankets yet but Houdini Blue is looking distinctly purple. I’m hoping that the colour shifts towards blue after washing in which case I can see why the colour is called Houdini! If not, well it has made some really lovely muted colours……

And finally, on the house move - we lost our buyer this week so it is back to square one. Knowing that this happens all the time and that it is just a delay doesn’t make it any easier. Thankfully we haven’t committed to anything in Scotland yet so we just need to take a deep breathe and get on with life. Which means that, when I get back from Festival, I’ll have time to get back to making art instead of packing. Which is a good thing.

I’m delighted to invite you to two ‘open studios’! I’m running them to help clear the studio and to spend time with some of the many students who have passed through the studio over the last 7 years. The first one will be next Wednesday 23rd July from 1pm to 3pm. The second will be on Tuesday 29th July, also from 1pm to 3pm. In both cases the wooden gates at the side of the house will be open and you can just walk up to the studio (email me if you need the address - admin@leahhiggins.co.uk).

There will be tea, coffee and cake! There will also be lots of my older quilts up for grabs, fabric packs, second hand textile books and the odd jug / orange bucket. It would be lovely to see you!

Having shipped the art for my exhibition in Telluride I have been able to work through my fabric mountain and have loaded lots of lovely printed fabrics onto my website. You can find them here. There are some really lovely pieces which I have been tempted to keep. But there are only 24 hours in every day ….so my loss could be your gain!

Our house sale is going smoothly and it’s now time to pack up my studio. Which is heartbreaking but I know that I’ll end up with another beautiful studio eventually. That studio however is likely to be smaller than this one and I can’t take everything with me. So, a few months ago, I listed the art that isn’t moving with us on my website at really reduced prices. I’ll be taking the unsold pieces off the website in about 10 days and finding alternate homes for them. So if you haven’t had a look yet please do. You can find them here.

I’d also like to say thank you to those of you who have bought my Simply Screen Printing book from Amazon. If you live outside the UK this can save you a small fortune in shipping costs!

And thank you to TextileArtist.org. My workshop with them is going really well and I may have converted more people to the sheer joy that is breakdown printing.

In other news I will be shipping work for my upcoming exhibition in Telluride, Colorado next week. I thought you might like a peek at one of the new pieces. Here is Ruins 14: Lowrys Chimneys ……

I’m delighted to let you know that I have worked with TextileArtist.org to create a workshop for their Stitch Club members that goes live on Monday 30th June.

For those of you who don’t already know TextileArtist.org is a fabulous online resource for all things textile. Their Stitch Club delivers a wide variety of short mostly stitch based workshops with the occasional workshop on adding colour, mark and shape to cloth.

I loved the challenge of creating a short workshop based on breakdown printing (my favourite technique) that included worked samples of how the printed fabrics could be used to create hand stitched and machine stitched outcomes. I tried to keep it simple and, frankly affordable, so it is ideal for those want to try out a little bit of screen printing on their kitchen table without spending a fortune on stuff they might not use again. That said, breakdown printing is addictive!

The workshop is video based, supported by a detailed workbook. There will be an ebook of what I hope are inspirational images of my work. Importantly I will be providing online support for Stitch Club members for the first two weeks after the workshop goes live.

To get the ball rolling TextileArtist.org have posted an interview with me that you can find here.

Exciting times!

I may have already mentioned that September is going to be an exciting month for me. I have a solo exhibition at the AhHaa School for the Arts in Telluride and will be teaching two five day workshops there.

Telluride is a beautiful town located in the San Juan Mountains of Southwest Colorado at 8,750' elevation. It was formed during the Colorado gold rush in the 1870s. Notoriously difficult to access one local legend says the the town was named after the phrase ‘To Hell You Ride’. More likely it was named after the telluride minerals found there. Silver, gold, copper and mercury were mined in the mountains and there were some amazing feats of engineering over the years to aid processing and transport. All the kind of stuff that gets me excited!

Today Telluride is renowned for its skiing in the winter and arts and music festivals in the summer. Ah Haa was founded in 1991, and the state of the art facility was completed in 2021. The School has amazing teaching spaces as well as a gallery. You can find out more here.

My exhibition will be there for the month of September. It is called Beneath Our Feet and will feature some of my coal mining and cotton mill pieces including the 4 metre long Ruins 12: Beneath Our Feet that I made for my exhibition at Salford Museum and Gallery in late 2023. It’s great that this one will get another outing! I’m also creating new pieces for the exhibition including four abstract pieces inspired by Tellurides mining past.

I will be teaching two workshops. The first, Simply Screen Printing, runs from 25th to 29th September and is suitable for beginners. There are still places available and you can find more details here. The second, Luscious Layers, runs from 2nd to 6th October and is aimed at students with prior knowledge of using dyes to add colour to cloth. You can find out more here.

It is very exciting and a little scary. And it will almost certainly coincide with the sale of the house and our move to Scotland but who wants a quiet life!

This is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while because of the prohibitive cost of international shipping and the customs and duties charges faced by European customers.

The book can now be ordered from anywhere and will be printed using Amazon’s print on demand service. Postage will be free for Prime customers. It is also available for instant download as a Kindle book. Just search Amazon books for ‘Simply Screen Printing’ or ‘Leah Higgins’. There is another author called Leah Higgins but you shouldn’t confuse her books with mine. The list price in the US is $45 although Amazon.com are currently showing it with a 12% discount. The Kindle price is $27. Prices in other countries are set by Amazon using their own conversion rates.

In the UK the paperback costs £33.30 and the Kindle version £19.98. However I still have about 100 copies from my last print run and you can buy these directly from me here. I’ve reduced the price to £30 to keep it competitive.

I appreciate that $45 or £33.30 seems pricy but Amazon take a very big chunk … I’ll only be earning approx $7 / £5 per copy sold by Amazon. Which is more than a bit frustrating but Amazon gives me access to markets I couldn’t reach on my own. Needless to say that I earn more money if you buy direct from me but I know how unaffordable this can be outside of the UK.

Even if you already have a copy (thank you!) please go look it up on Amazon - the more people that search for it the more easy it becomes to find! If you do buy a copy (thank you!) please take a moment to leave a review (ideally a good one!). You can also ‘follow me’ via my authors page. And please feel free to spread the word!

And in other news …. we have a buyer. Phew! Largs here we come.

I’ve had a lovely couple of days working through another small mountain of fabric that I am never going to use to create fabric packs that I’m hoping to rehome. Some of the fabrics were dyed for my Colour Your Palette book. Some are left overs from art series that I’m not going to work on again. Some were ‘demo’ pieces from past workshops. And quite a lot were created just for fun in the hope that I could squeeze a decades work out of each year ……

You can find them here.

The packs vary in size. There are some scrap packs which contain lots of smaller pieces of fabric as well as packs with multiple larger pieces. Lots of colours. All cotton, mostly cotton poplin but some packs of cotton sateen fabric as well. I hope you like them!

PS: house update for those who are interested … no formal buyer yet but lots of viewings and a couple of early offers.

… with a 5 bedroom, 2 bathroom, Victorian semi-detached house to sweeten the deal. Yes at long flippin’ last our house is on the market! About 4 weeks later than I had planned but unsurprising given the scale of the archeological dig into my husbands study and the front room in the cellar. And we have managed to clear out huge amounts of stuff without getting divorced or killing each other. But there is still time … hubby has got to reduce all of the books / comics / graphic novels etc that are currently taking up nearly 5 walls of shelf space by half. And yes, I still have to finish going through stuff in the studio.

If you are feeling noisy you see the house online by clicking hear. Or you can look for a video walk through on Instagram by clicking here. Please feel free to share - especially to anyone who is looking for a modestly priced artists studio with huge house attached.

The last four to six weeks have been solely focused on the house with little time for rest or art. We caught up on our sleep and had a thoroughly lazy few days in Largs last week - great weather, amazing views and Nardinis - and yesterday I got back into the studio to make art. I have some pieces in my new Shoreline series that need finishing but my priority is making new art for my exhibition in Telluride in September. I’ll be sending over a couple of very big Ruins pieces and the remaining coal mining panels but need to fill approximately seven metres of wall space. My plan is to create four small (for me) abstract pieces inspired by the history of Telluride. It was originally a mining town, part of the gold and silver rush in Colorado in the 19th century and was notoriously difficult to access. I’m fascinated by the feats of engineering that supported its expansion …. much like the canals, railways and navigable levels that supported coal mining here in Manchester. I’m also going to make a couple of small Mill Tower pieces which will link in with the large Ruins pieces. So busy but in the happiest of ways!