Hello Laura,

Hello and welcome to our newsletter.

Before we get into this week's news, we realise that last week a few recipients of our newsletter couldn't see the pictures Of course it's really important to us that you can see the photos! We reported the issue to the tech support, but if this ever happens again, please scroll down the newsletter until you see an option to click to view as a webpage. Clicking that will open the newsletter in your browser and all our illustrations will load.

Now, let's get started. You might remember last week I was talking to you about the Carravaggio in the National? I love to visit the gallery whenever I'm in London, but this time it seemed busier than ever. I don't know about you, but I love a quiet moment with a favourite painting. If you've not been before, next time you're in London I would recommend heading to the Courtauld. It's just a few minutes walk from the National and has an excellent collection. The difference? You have to pay to get in and I suppose that means that casual visitors aren't there to just pop in to kill time, or shelter from the rain! It makes for a much more tranquil experience. There's time to look and appreciate the works properly without feeling like you're in someone else's way. Best of all? You can spend time with some real blockbuster art.

In this room alone there is Modigliani, Toulouse Lautrec, Renoir, Seurat, Manet, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Monet and my favourite, Gauguin.

You can barely get close to the Van Gogh Sunflowers in the National, but here in the Courtauld is one of his fabulous self-portraits and no-one else but me looking at it!

It is a treat to see these paintings for real. It's more about appreciating the image, it's an opportunity to enjoy them as objects, to understand the scale, the presence that they have in the room. That said the Courtauld website is good and well worth a visit. There is a virtual tour where you can move through the rooms of the gallery and take a closer look at the exhibits.

Courtauld website

In Linda's studio...

Linda's been welcoming in the autumn season here in the UK with some new work in her studio. You might remember that she recently made some plant prints. I think I was supposed to have bound them into a book for her! Well, while she waits on me to do that, she's been drawing and painting onto the papers.

The plant printing is obvious a direct way to record the leaves that are in the garden at the moment. You can see she's working with that idea of it being a diary and adding extra detail with watercolour, drawing, and adding notes.

If you like the idea of working in a journal or visual diary, we have a couple of workshops which will hopefully help you get started. Here they are, one for working in fabric, one with paper...Just click on either image for all the info.

In my shop...

Thank you for the orders placed in my shop since last week. The 20% site wide saving continues, please just use the code save20 at checkout to get your discount. With this discount code and the very favourable exchange rate for many of our overseas customers at the moment, it's quite a good time to order from me!

Some of the designs from last week have sold out, but I've added some more fabrics for you to choose from. This is a lovely design, I made it from artwork in my sketchbook which mixes collage with some printing and painting. The design is digitally printed to cotton fabric and it's just crying out for you to stitch into it! I think it would be great with quilting, you could even add more colour with fabric paint, or draw into it with a permanent pen to add extra detail.