About Me
I am Sarah Lee, I am an artist and craft market organiser living on a Dutch barge on the River Thames together with my husband Martin, and our British Shorthair cat Frobisher.
My main interest is folk art style painting. My love of folk art started when I was very young on skiing holidays to Austria. Holiday time is always exciting as a child, and my memories of those times are full of the brightly coloured Tyrolean embroidered costumes, traditional folk art style paintings on the wooden chalet style buildings, and snow!
It has been many years since I have been skiing, but these elements still fill me with joy. Since then I have found lots of different styles of folk art that I love from other parts of the world too that also influence my artwork.
Artwork
I originally started a small business Wire & Gemstone Ltd making wirework and gemstone jewellery as a sideline to my main job as a scientist. However, I left science in 2019 to concentrate on running our narrowboat accommodation business with my husband Martin and so our business Crafty Boaters was born.
During the first lockdown I discovered my set of old pastel pencils whilst I was cleaning out one of our cupboards, and I started to create pastel pencil drawings. But it didn’t stop there! I went one to learn dot mandala art, block printing, and other acrylic paint techniques. I even painted the side hatch doors on our narrowboat. Today I concentrate my efforts on acrylic painting on hand cast art plaster products, painting on wood and slate, and I still create the occasional pastel painting of pets for friends and family.
Our narrowboat accommodation business is now closed, and Martin has now retired, so with a slight tweak on the name from Crafty Boaters to The Crafty Boater I have carried on with the artwork and markets, and have added blogging about our watery lifestyle on our boats as well.
Craft Markets
Towards the end of the second lockdown, we realised that many of the outlets for artist and crafters to sell their work at Christmas markets had been cancelled due to Covid 19 restrictions, so Martin and I worked quickly to organise a ‘socially distanced’ craft market in the car park of our local hotel in Lechlade, and so the first Crafty Boaters Christmas market was born. I now organise five markets in Lechlade per year, and despite the name change for the main part of the business, we have kept the name Crafty Boaters for our markets.
With five years experience running the craft markets I now offer some consultancy services to those who are thinking of running their own markets.
You can find out more about the markets, and other services that I offer here.
