The Working Girl's Studio

08/03/2026

Happy World Embroidery Day! ❤️🧵

Today, I’m celebrating the extraordinary people around the world who express themselves through needle and thread.

Embroidery has the remarkable ability to cross borders, languages and cultures. It can tell stories, preserve traditions, honour memories, express love, protest injustice, bring comfort and create connection. A single stitch may seem small, but together millions of stitches have the power to transform both cloth and lives.

Over the past seventeen years, it has been a huge privilege to witness this through The Red Dress. Every embroidered panel carries not only exceptional skill, but also the experiences, hopes and humanity of the person who created it.

To every embroiderer—whether you stitch every day or are just beginning—thank you for keeping this beautiful art form alive.

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I’m now back in the UK after a whopping 30-hour journey via Taiwan and Bangkok! Meanwhile, The Red Dress is very happy in residence at the Museum of Brisbane, where it will remain on display until 13 September.

📸: Kiri Johnston 🙏🏽

01/01/2026

12/25/2025

Happy Holidays to all of our Facebook, family and friends!

12/06/2025

Color is the skin of life.”
With this single sentence, Sonia Delaunay summed up the inner battle she carried for years—a struggle that began in childhood when she was taken from her parents due to poverty and raised by her wealthy aunt in Russia. Despite the comfort, she always felt like an outsider… a “guest” who didn’t truly belong. This deep sense of displacement stayed with her, and when she later moved to Paris, she faced a new challenge: being a woman artist in a time that imposed strict limits on women and dismissed their creative presence, which intensified her feelings of suffocation and isolation.

Art, however, became her turning point. The moment she touched color, she started building a world of her own—one untouched by painful memories or social constraints. She used color as a path to freedom, transformed her loneliness into rhythmic circular movement, and reshaped the world around her with lines, circles, and gradients that declared: “I am here… creating my world with my own hands.”

For Sonia, art was not an escape but a reconstruction of the self. Color became her language, light became her space, and the canvas became the only place where she could decide who she was. Through this liberation, she moved from the margins into the spotlight: pioneering Orphism, blending art with fashion, textile, and design, and becoming the first woman to receive a lifetime retrospective at the Louvre.

Sonia Delaunay’s journey transformed from loneliness and non-belonging into full freedom—a freedom she created herself. Art became the door through which she overcame everything that once tried to limit her.