Is there anything more anxiety-inducing to the writer than a blank page? Perhaps only a blank page accompanied by a blinking cursor, which seems to remind me, with every flash, of all the words I haven’t written yet. Spiteful little thing.

Well, I’ll show him.

Hello Reader.

I’m Cotton Jenny. Welcome to my blog.

This is where you can find, should you be looking, all things fabric. It is also a record of my own exploration through the world of textiles. Let me catch you up on my journey so far.

I started knitting with my Grandma Rose as a little girl. I inherited her ancient sewing machine, and used it to make my own (terrible) Hallowe’en costumes. Fast-forward several years, and I was finishing a crazy-quilt my other grandmother, Alice, never got to finish. Jump ahead another year or two, and there am I, hunting madly online for anything and everything textile.

Well, I found sewing blogs, and dress-making websites, and online stores where you could get knitting notions, and seamstress stuff, and pretty patterns, but my search for the kind of exhaustive, detail-focused, cross-referenced, obsessive online encyclopaedia of fabrics, the sort for which the art historian in me longed, was nowhere to be found.

Enter Cotton Jenny. I am an academic at heart (and in real life). So here you find me, in the present moment, starting what I hope will become a comprehensive and useful collection of articles, interviews, lists (squee! I LOVE lists) to help you, dear reader, in your own creative pursuits, or simply to whet your appetite for textiles, in all their glory. I can also promise links to other great and useful sources, both online and otherwise, as well as the odd textile-based joke and frequent poetic waxings. I can only apologise in advance for those.

I hope you’re all as excited, but not half so nervous, as I am to get properly stuck in.

With that, dear Reader, onward!

Yours,

Cotton Jenny