The short answer is because I love it. I love it. I love threads, fabrics, all haberdashery, I love piecing and patching, and painting on fabric, I love sewing, by hand or by machine, with cotton, linen, silk, or wool. I love pattern, and colour, and texture, I love building up layers, fabrics, threads, stitch upon stitch; layers, textures, subtle differences in materials, in sheen, in intensity, in size, strength, touch – it’s just such an intensely visual and tactile artistic practice. So that’s why I sew.

That’s why I do it. And I really must commit this answer to memory, because I am always, completely and utterly floored by the question: “And what do you do?” On a good day I can answer it, though it has to be said, there aren’t many days when the phrase textile pet portrait artist feels normal; but then it’s the question I feel coming along in its wake that is the really terrifying one: “And why do you do that?” Long pause …. Which is why I thought it might be interesting to write a blog post on the subject, and why, presumably, that one blog post has already divided into two.

But in that splurge of the first paragraph lies the point for me: texture, or touch. It is so hard to capture it in photos. The job of a photo is, after all, to flatten what you see.

In case you haven’t come across it before, freestyle-machine embroidery is embroidery done on a sewing machine. That’s it. It’s not a computer-generated image, my machine is an old Singer from the 1950s, so there’s nothing digital about it – it’s just me, “drawing” with a sewing machine. Imagine drawing, but with a fixed pen, so the pen stays put, and you have to move the paper around underneath it to make the drawing. That’s what I do, but with a sewing machine. It’s faster, noisier, and potentially, a lot more dangerous, but exciting and inspiring.

Some people call it threadsketching or threadpainting, which captures what it is that makes this art so … would I say, quirky? Perhaps, unusual, certainly, and I think, so special. It’s the combination of the two forms, painting, with threads; a portrait that conveys something precious of the feel of your animal, meaning both the character – the souls of these best beloveds that shine out through the tiny hand stitched highlights in the eye – and the feeling, literally the touch, the tactile, soft, scruffy, tangled, silky, smooth, furry wonder of them. The stitches, in colour, direction, length, and it has to be said, multitude, of them, “feels” like your animal. I’m not suggesting you stroke these portraits (and they mostly do end up behind glass, not that they have to – I send them out unframed, but I’m happy to talk you through your many options in framing), but as there is a difference between a photograph and a painting, so there is between a painting and a threadpainting. You just have to stand in front of one one day and you’ll see.