Being born second of two girls and with a five year age difference, I spent much of my own world in imaginative play. The great outdoors featured largely in our lives, in fair weather or foul, with time spent each day riding Shetland ponies and playing with various dogs, making ‘houses’, mud pies and collecting ‘treasure’.

My father’s many brothers and sisters were all creative people and we were encouraged to paint, draw, knit, embroider and generally be creative. Skills that were further encouraged by the nuns at the convent school, even if we had to knit with the battleship grey wool for everything. They must have been given a job lot.Looking back at this wonderful childhood, I realised that nothing has changed for me. I still love the feel of a pencil or paintbrush, stitch daily or "play" in the large garden I am lucky to call mine.

Creating is such therapy, whatever medium I use, but, I must say stitch is my favourite. I don't consider myself an expert in anything, but more a "Jack of all trades", who can turn her hand to most things thanks to my father's encouragement to explore and investigate how things work. One of the best things I have ever undertaken in life was to study City and Guilds Textiles and Embroidery with some wonderful tutors who made me really look and see beyond the obvious. It's a family joke that family are seldom seen in holiday photos - mostly they're of drain covers, rust, peeling paint, shells, tree bark, debris on the beach etc.

I find Inspiration and excitement in the most mundane or obscure places. Stacks and stacks of carved terracotta pots in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, crystallised fish bones for as far as the eye can see on the shores of the Salton Sea, moody and misty mudflats off Mersea Island, the desolated buildings and gravel of Dungeness with rusting machinery on the shingle banks, majestic Yosemite and the wonders of Gothic Architecture. I need a dozen lives to make use of the visuals that inspire me.

Looking back at those early years, I realise how formative they were. I still have the collecting bug - boxes and dishes of shells, nuts, seeds, pieces of bark, fragments of lichen, feathers, tiny delicate animal bones, rusty washers and flaking paint. That's before I even mention the threads and fabrics! Being a typical Pisces, I float through life, sometimes devoid of discipline, other times, totally OCD especially about storing threads by colour, in labelled boxed, by weight, by fibre content, by usage. Many a happy hour is spent "sorting". A typical avoidance technique, I know, but a pleasure in itself.

Recently, I was lucky to attend a workshop taught by Amanda Hislop. It was a revelation to me. I love colour of any hue, but I restrained myself on that course to using shades of white, grey and beige. What a release! I loved the work I produced, the calmness it brought to the end result and the process itself. It's a well known fact that our eyes see colour first, shape second and then if you addpattern, the first two become scrambled. By using the calm whites, greys and beiges, the work retained a crispness that I softened where required with strands of fibre and torn papers. Saying that, one of my favourite pieces I produced isn't based on a visual starting point and isn't in pale colours. It's a piece I entitled "Meg Merrilles" taken from the poem by John Keats. It's based on scenery and colours from the life of Meg who lived on the brooding moors in Scotland. I hand dyed all the fabrics and layered them with simple stitches to form a panorama of the moors. It's a piece I look at and think -"Yes, I can live with that one"..