My new website

is now up - finally

Behind the scenes I’ve been pulling things down and pushing them into new shapes. From the front it doesn’t look much different but around the back, and in the real world, a lot of things have changed. It took a while because it also needed to incorporate my slow but determinedly relentless move away from Google products, and so I’ve been learning a new email platform. And of course Squarespace has changed how it does things, because these tech-bro platforms (and this one here, Substack is another tech-bro thing) are always relentlessly ‘optimising’ which basically means adding in new things that don’t work properly and pushing AI on you. Even though you hate it, you still have to work out how to use it.

The major change has been to start including things that I find that are not necessarily textiles. I spend so much time in brocantes and flea markets and I see so many remarkable things, and very often I pass them up because they are not textiles. But I need also to learn and examine new things, and so a while ago I started allowing myself to bring some of these things home, and now I am sharing them with you. They are odd, beautiful, sometimes wonky things, and there isn’t a single common thread between them.

Often dealers will ask me “what are you looking for?” and my only honest reply is “Things that speak to me”. That’s it. That’s the common thread.

Oh, there is another criteria. They need to be able to be posted. But also, I think I can now arrange for pickup should you be in my remote tucked-away corner of France. I have a number of things - ridiculous umbrellas, huge maps of Paris, strange embroidered screens - which I bought because I couldn’t not, but I can’t possibly post them. You could come and have tea in my garden amongst the piles of bricks and scaffolding and bits of downpipe and I could hand these things over in person.

Anyway there is not a huge amount up yet, but more is coming. Something I had to do for myself was to stop using my phone to take product photos. I just don’t want to be with my phone. We are breaking up. I have a sort of distaste for it, after years of spending six or seven hours a day staring at it. I am not wild about screens full-stop but the phone screen feels like it’s injecting rays of evil blue light into my brain and that I might get sucked into its vortex, which is often what actually happens. We all know now how addictive the scroll is. I’m susceptible and I am aware of it, and I get so much more done and feel so much better when my phone is in a different room. Or lost, which increasingly happens. I put it down and walk away and then my son has to find it and I am always a little disappointed when he does but also impressed that he knows so well all the places I tend to forget it in.

So these are a few things, graces and presents, that I gave myself. I don’t know if it will seem any different to my customers, but I believe in energy exchanges and so I choose to believe it will. Go check it out - www.lagrossetoile.com