Hi

Hi, I'm Kath Walls from the UK but now retired to Crete, Greece. I've lived here four years this time (another period I lived here for 5 years) and still love it. We live in the village of Amari in the beautiful Amari valley just south of Rethymno and have a large garden where my partner grows our vegs and I try not to get too involved as I really want to concentrate on sewing. All my life I've worked in offices but usually doing a night school in some craft or art. Really I was born too early, the art college in my home town of Scarborough opened about a year after I started work and, at that time, was really for the super-arty and the sensible thing was to earn money! So I did, then marriage and family came along plus all the other diversions that life throws at you and my hobbies remained very much that. Mid-fifties, unattached and wondering what to do in retirement (but not thinking I'd return to Crete on my own) I started a more serious nightschool in Creative Embroidery and was lucky enough to have Anne Gibson as tutor; she had been at the very prestigious Manchester University teaching but cut down her workload for personal reasons and so we were given a glimpse into the modern world of (really) creative embroidery. That set my mind off and on retirement I enrolled for a City and Guilds course, again in embroidery because that included a little machine embroidery, felting, paper-making and art. Again we were really lucky with our art and embroidery tutors as they treat us like sponges, threw everything at us with the instruction to yell when our brains were full!!! Anyway, the foundation course lasted 2/3 of the year then we started on the first year proper. By this time I'd accepted a suggestion/invitation to return to Crete which was opportune as the course then foundered under funding cuts. So - here I am, lots of techniques somewhere in my brain and in various notebooks but with not a lot of practical experience. Hopefully this discipline will help me to overcome this; I intend to try lots of the techniques and have already been looking at many other embroiderer / textile artists' work as inspiration. Thank you all for having me on your team, I hope my pages stand up to the rest of you