Hello!

I am an Australian living in France with my French-Australian family and a rescue hound called Hugo. I came here by accident, but it’s now home and I make my living by selling antique French textiles, specialising in the handwoven hemp and linen farmhouse textiles of the 19th and early 20th centuries, from where my business name La Grosse Toile comes from.

I’m often in my atelier ironing and photographing textiles, and you can see the pieces I have for sale up on my website at lagrossetoile.com and my regular posts on Instagram. I write a lot about textiles, their uses, and how they reflect our societies and our values. I also travel a fair bit around my region of France, in search of textiles, and I spend an inordinate amount of time talking to people in markets about practically everything.

My newsletter is for all the things that don’t quite fit into an Insta post, the wanderings, the things people talk to me about in brocantes, the increasing obsession with 19th century metal house-fittings, everything I can eat especially mushrooms and cheese, old things that aren’t textiles as well as old things that are, the perils and joys of running a tiny business, looking at houses and maybe one day owning one…but above all, just the curiosity and wonder of it all.

Come stroll along with me.

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Come join me as I ramble about textiles, especially old hemp ones, textile sustainability, living in France as an odd foreigner, and life and work under late-stage capitalism when all you really want to do is garden and eat.

People

Writer, antique textile dealer, Australian living in France, mother of two extraordinary people, apprentice indigo-dyer, obsessed with textiles, selvedges, old people in markets, trees, eating, and trying to make our rescue greyhound less neurotic.