Hi, I‘m Nicole.

I’m a textile artist, designer and teacher, but perhaps the easiest way to describe me is simply as someone who has spent most of her life making things with her hands.

Textiles have always been part of my world. I grew up surrounded by fabrics, patterns and sewing machines. My mother was a seamstress, my father sold sewing machines, and while I went on to study interior design, textiles and working with my hands remained a constant part of my life. Working with fabric never felt like something I consciously chose, it was simply there, woven into my life from the beginning.

Over the years, my curiosity took me in many different directions. I sewed and designed, knitted and crocheted, embroidered, experimented with techniques, built brands, taught others and constantly learned something new along the way. I have always loved the moment when you understand something well enough to stop following the rules quite so closely and begin asking, what if I did it differently?

For a long time, however, my professional life became much more about doing than creating. I ran my own sewing atelier, with days filled with alterations, commissions, fittings and many hours behind the sewing machine. I was working with textiles every day, yet somewhere along the way I realised that being busy with creative work and actually feeling creative are not necessarily the same thing.

At some point, I began questioning not only what I wanted to do professionally, but how I wanted to live and what I wanted to make room for. My interest in personal development, spirituality and Buddhist philosophies became part of that process. I have always been curious about people, ideas and different ways of looking at life, and I like the idea that we can remain curious, change our minds and keep evolving.

Somewhere within that process, I found my way back to embroidery; not as a completely new skill, but in a completely new way.

Working with a needle and thread has a rhythm that is very different from working at a sewing machine. It is slower and quieter. Your hands are occupied while your mind has space to wander, and there is something almost meditative about the repetition of stitching. Especially with techniques such as Sashiko, I discovered how much I enjoyed this combination of attention and freedom.

Embroidery soon became much more to me than simply another textile technique. It brought together so many things I love: craftsmanship and design, tradition and experimentation, patience and curiosity. And most importantly, it gave me back the freedom to create without having to know exactly where an idea would lead.

Today, calling myself a textile artist feels like giving myself permission to use everything I know without having to fit into one neat category. Decades of sewing and garment construction, embroidery, knitting, crochet, fabrics, colour and design all find their way into what I do. I love taking traditional techniques and looking at them with contemporary eyes, combining things that may not traditionally belong together and seeing what happens when an idea moves from paper to fabric.

That curiosity is also what I want to share through my work and my teaching. So many people believe they aren’t creative or hesitate because they’re afraid of doing something incorrectly. But creativity doesn’t begin with knowing exactly what you’re doing. It begins with being curious enough to try.

And perhaps that is what working with textiles has taught me more than anything else. You make one stitch, then another, and slowly something begins to take shape.

To me, that is what creativity is really about: the freedom to explore, to change, to make things your own and to see where they take you.