I love fine fabrics and the wonderful things people do with fine fabrics. This blog is about those fabrics and the people who do these wonderful things.

As far back as I can remember I’ve been fascinated by quality textiles and fine handwork. My earliest memories all have flashes of fabric, and wherever I’ve travelled I’ve wound up finding the fabric stores or the findings suppliers or the vintage clothing outlets – or all of the above. I love being surrounded by bolts of beautiful stuff. The jumble of an overstuffed fabric store fascinates me – as does the amazing work in truly good vintage or couture.

Not that I have high-end vintage or couture in my personal wardrobe; they’re beyond my budget and probably my patience. (Though I’d be happy make an exception for some vintage Yohji Yamamoto or one of Chanel’s Linton tweed pieces!)

However, I do succumb to the lure of yardage more often than is wise. Like most fabriholics I’ve got a stash. Most of it I bought with the intention of making something specific – though often it was mainly because the fabric was just too beautiful to resist.

My fascination with textiles goes beyond clothes; I’m an artist and independent curator, and many of the shows I’ve curated focused on textiles. As a student at the Ontario College of Art and Design I curated Under the Same Sky – an exhibit of garments from the collection of the Textile Museum of Canada at Harbourfront Centre in Toronto. Following graduation, I initiated and co-curated Hard Twist, the annual show of textile-based art at Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel for the whole of its fourteen-year run.

My own work often combines textiles, photography and digital collage like this panel based on shots of my garden and a streetscape in Kensington Market in Toronto, Canada.

Kensington Market is an odd, creative enclave in the heart of Toronto that combines a fiercely independent small-business community with an equally fierce and independent community of residents who are a wild mix of artists, recent immigrants, university students, staff and faculty, the homeless, the marginally-housed, lawyers, not-so-recent immigrants, film industry execs and little old ladies.

Recently, after twenty years in Kensington Market, I moved to Kitchener, Ontario, where my daughter and I bought a house dating from the 1920s. It’s two near-identical apartments, and we’ve been told it was built for two sisters, the daughters of the then owner of the long-since-closed Lang Tannery. The house has lovely bones, but has had a couple of difficult decades, so my daughter and I are ears-deep in repairs.

And one major alteration – creating a series of cat doors that allow our two cats to live in both apartments.

When not up to my ears in matters textile, I’m a writer, mother, independent curator, gardener, grandmother, historical recreationist and science fiction fan.