I love to use ink, paint and pastels in sketchbooks and as a base for stitch. My travelling sketchbooks, an example shown here, are responses to the time spent tutoring overseas and are also reminders of wonderful holidays in the UK. I am obsessed with Alcohol Inks and have almost mastered the use of that vibrant medium with stitch. I include inkjet prints in my 'paint box'. The printouts are now much more resistant to fading and I find that they make a great base for stitch.

I have always drawn and painted but the possibilities of stitch came later, through a City & Guilds course. The photos here show a range of work, from simple hand stitching to digital designs (interpreted through free machining). I often print my digital designs onto print friendly fabric and use them as a base for stitch (see example in the pic right). In this piece, a photograph of a poppy (taken at London's Heathrow airport on the way to Australia) was printed on inkjet media and was then combined with painted cotton at the base to form a larger stitch area.

Much as I love paint and stitch, I've got to say that my favourite techniques involve combining the two - mixed media. Maybe it's because there are no real rules - anything goes. It also allows Clive and me to collaborate, as we have done with the big pic on the right. Everything from inkjet printing on silk to using Clive's lettering skills combine here to tell a story.

In this 'bash', Maggie is working with alcohol inks to produce a tree design. She has a 40-page workshop on the subject and has discovered a way to use the inks with free machine techniques (see big pic on the right). You can download the workshop from her ETSY shop (MaggieGreyShop)

It all began with drawing and painting. My first ever Christmas gift from Clive was a set of good watercolour paints and some lovely paper. So, it's all his fault. A book by the late Liz Hubbard, on free machining into painted fabrics, led me to add random stitching to my watercolours. I thought that I'd invented mixed media. City & Guilds teaching soon put me right and I completed the course with distinction.

A meeting with the amazing Valerie Campbell-Harding and a shared love of, and fascination with, computer design led to team teaching the subject with Val in various colleges around the country. Val talked me into joining her in writing a book for the publisher B T Batsford. This was the first of many books, either as author or co-author with some wonderful artist friends, including Val and Jane Wild.

I loved teaching and soon we were travelling, running courses and workshops. Clive and I ran classes on computer design and together we were part of a team developing textile modules for the Royal College of Art, Schools Technology Project. At this time, I was also editor of Embroidery magazine for the Embroiderers' Guild.

Growing out of a distance learning course, Workshop on the Web (WOW) was a quarterly online journal with step-by-step workshops by well-known tutors. This was only possible due to our partnership with Fiona Edwards, a long-time colleague and a great partner in crime. We are still working together and have some exciting new projects in mind.

Fiona's involvement led to the publication of the WOWbooks, with the associated website which expands the web content and adds new material with downloadable PDFs. Publishing WOW as a book came about through the earlier establishment of d4daisy Books, with photographer Michael Wicks. I have written many books for d4daisy.

Textiles have taken me on a journey around the world, teaching and exhibiting in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA. My exhibitions in the UK have included gallery shows with Wessex Textiles and travelling exhibitions with the Knitting & Stitching Show. My work is held in many private collections and I once had a sell-out exhibition in Canada, which was a great relief as I didn't have to have the work shipped home.

Stockholm
The piece shown right was mostly made from varied weights of paper.
The drawings were enlarged before being scanned, coloured
and printed using PaintShop Pro (a great design program). The stitching is minimal. A Sandra Meech workshop was the inspiration for the photocopied lettering.