Dearest Needleworking and Hive Friends,

Our first week in Portugal has been glorious: super chaotic energetically, and magically beautiful; sensual, nourishing, calming, overstimulating – all in equal measure!

My silence and solitude – which made up my every single day, for most of the past 15 years – have been few and far-between, and my sewing space has been limited to sifting through my suitcases and getting my machine at least onto a table!

However, sewing is taking up a lot of my mind and energy; I’ve just finished uploading banners, profile photos, text, and correcting my location, mission and vision, on various online platforms – including my website which you can find here https://www.claregaiasophia.com/ It feels wonderful to have a whole new clarity about what I’m doing in the world, and to bring ‘clothing therapy’ to the centre of it!

Starting afresh is such a blessing, following all these years of kind of frustrated stunted growth in Guardia Sanframondi and Italy. I kept saying it, and wanting change, but found it incredibly difficult to really believe that it might ever happen. The actual moment of driving away from my Arthouse, and from the town that held me all these years, was so simple; like picking up a new piece of fabric and deciding to chop and re-sew it…

Each step of the journey to Portugal has been like a single stitch: every point made by the needle through the fabric helps to hold it together more firmly. And every step of the trip here, driving and ferrying away from Italy, has felt like my life is being held more solidly – like I am safer and more stable, surer about my purpose and more loved-respected-care-for than ever before by anyone near to me.

Nurturing my sewing practise seems to resonate too with my thriving relationship: a warmth and familiarity, the pure joy of just being in the sensory immersion of it, the mastery of harmonising colour/ texture/ feeling about a garment… All of this vibrates happily in me, just as my magical new partnership does: the simplest and yet the most profound of joy-full full-fill-ment. I am One with my lifeloves!

So, onwards into a blessedly sunny day, here in the glen – up in the misty woodlands of eucalyptus and cork oak… Birds chirping merrily, sun glinting off of the heavily-laden dew in the gardens, fields below us lighting up with the still-low morning sunshine.

It is the perfect weather and light today to get my sewing table in order, and I so look forward to delving into my first projects… IF I can tear myself away from the excitement of connecting with this place, and with Vincent of course – Love Of My Life and Captain Of My Heart!