I have been preparing recently for the public voting day at The Storey in Lancaster, as the Lancaster & Morecambe Repair Cafe have been put forward for potential National Lottery funding of Pots of Possibility. In just a few short months, it has gone from a lingering idea to a group with over 500 members, 89 volunteers and a small but strong team of committee members. I have been recognised in the local news and have people contact me regularly including being asked to give a talk next week at our local Environmentalist group. It has been a whirlwind, but a privilege all the same.

After a meeting with the other members about how to approach the voting day, I offered to create a hand-made banner using some old linen. It was a bit heavy to pin up on my way, so I stapled it and lightly sketched out the lettering before painting it in. I left it for a couple of days to dry properly and was pretty pleased with the hand-made rawness of it, which I felt reflected the values of the group.

When I came to remove it from the wall, the paint had seeped through the linen and the imprint of the fabric was fused to my kitchen wall! I set to work sanding down the wall and repainting it. In the process I had to remove everything from my wall – sketches, notes pinned up, photos etc and when I began to curate the wall again, I decided to have a look through my doom pile of past sketches and paintings that perhaps luckily, had escaped the bin.

I had found an old box of frames a while ago at our local recycle centre and decided to get them out and put the empty frames against the old artwork to see how it would look if I cut them down. To my surprise, I loved how some of them appeared when reframed in a new and different composition. It was an exciting moment and I was delighted with the outcome. It then got me thinking more about the possibilities of revisiting old work and looking at it in different ways, from different angles, different perspectives. I often leave my written work to one side for a while before revisiting it with fresh eyes, and now realise I should do the same with my artwork! A very happy accident indeed!