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A Cross Stitched for the Ones Who Crossed the Sea
There is a wall slowly growing inside Studio Kre’at. It isn’t a gallery wall. It isn’t carefully styled. It is becoming a wall of remembrance. Today I took a scrappy little calico cross that I had stitched by hand some time ago. It was plain, unfinished, and beautifully ordinary. Then I reached for small scraps of green fabric pieces that whispered Ireland and I began slow stitching them onto the cross. Every stitch felt like a prayer. Not because the fabric is precious, but
Lisa Raie
5 hours ago2 min read
The Pages That Hold the Leftovers A quiet entry from the Studio Kre’at Open Journal
This morning I wasn’t planning to make art. I was simply cleaning my studio table. The little scraps had gathered, as they always do. A few loose threads. An empty embroidery floss label. Tiny offcuts of fabric. A business card. Wisps of black cotton tangled together. Fragments that looked like they had already served their purpose. And yet… I couldn’t throw them away. Instead, I opened my altered book. There is something deeply freeing about these pages because they ask f
Lisa Raie
3 days ago2 min read
The Remembrance Snippet Roll ~ A little archive of the things we might otherwise forget
“… I am going to let this Remembrance Snippet Roll unfold slowly.
There will be no rushing it.
I will share little pieces of it here as it grows over on my YouTube channel ~ the things I find, the things I stitch, the memories that surface and perhaps some of the stories that sit quietly behind them.
A weekly remembrance.
One little snippet at a time.
Come join me
Lisa Raie
Aug 173 min read
Making Peace With What Is
And so I found myself writing these simple words in my journal today; “Life is not at all as I imagined, but being able to make peace with life as it is ~ I am so blessed and grateful to live each day as who I am.” There was a time when I believed peace would come when life finally resembled the plans I had carefully carried. Yet the years have taught me something far gentler. Peace does not always arrive through changed circumstances. More often, it is found when we loosen o
Lisa Raie
Jul 261 min read
Rest for the Weary Soul
My dear friends, today I scribble this reflection from the Gospel (Matthew 11:25–30) as Jesus speaks directly to the tired parts of our hearts. He looks at the heavy burdens we carry, our anxieties, our endless to do lists, and the quiet struggles no one else sees and He offers us a beautiful, gentle invitation if we dare listen closely enough: "Come to me." And if you listen, you’ll notice that Jesus does not demand that we fix our lives before we approach Him. He does not
Lisa Raie
Jul 62 min read
The Chooks Are Out
This painting feels like a quiet memory made visible. And it speaks very loudly in quiet whispers, where my art is wandering these days. Life is often made up of ordinary mornings, familiar routines, and small moments that rarely make it into history books, yet become the places where love quietly grows. And so through this piece “The Chooks Are Out” another branch of my family tree can be seen. Again the people and their place of residence are not marked by grand events or f
Lisa Raie
Jun 302 min read
Not Alone In The Making: ~ A Prayerful Reflection
Lord, Today I find myself thinking about hands. Hands that stitched before mine. Hands that carried responsibilities I can only begin to imagine. Hands that repaired, comforted, provided, and persevered. As I continue stitching my legacy quilt, I am reminded that every thread I pull today follows a path laid down by someone before me. My thoughts return to Mary Martha. To the quilts she made. To the hours she spent creating warmth and comfort from her own hands. Though separa
Lisa Raie
Jun 172 min read
My Vision Is Extraordinary Clear Now…
My vision is extraordinarily clear now. Studio Kre’at is becoming more than an art studio, more than a writing practice, and more than a lineage project. It is becoming an archive of emotional survival. A place where the lives of real women are not flattened into dates and records, but restored as fully human: mothers, sisters, carers, migrants, protectors, wounded women, builders of refuge, women who endured, women who quietly changed the lives of others. And what makes this
Lisa Raie
May 132 min read
The Boy Who Signed Another Name (An Anzac Day Letter)
There is a kind of silence that lives between the lines of a family story. Not absence ~ never that, but a quiet that holds what could not be said at the time. As I prepare for Anzac Day, I find myself sitting with one of those silences. His name was Thomas Francis Cass. Just nineteen years old. A boy, really. A son of Johanna and John, my 2 x great grandparents who was raised in Footscray, in a home that knew both hardship and deep, enduring faith. A home where children were
Lisa Raie
Apr 254 min read
Sides To Life We Don’t See…
If you wander with me over on instagram and tiktokhttps://www.tiktok.com/@studio_kreat?_r=1&_t=ZS-95lgWczuOQO you would of seen and read a snippet of my thoughts as a AFL fan, as I found myself stopping…not just to watch the game, but to think about the sides of life we don’t see. I’m sitting this afternoon again thinking about the unseen sides to life we don’t see and so I journal these thoughts here: And when I say the unseen, I mean the quiet struggles so many carry ~ the
Lisa Raie
Apr 232 min read
The Lamp Within the Body Letter Nine: Carrying the Lamp Forward
To you, yes YOU who is reading this letter, There is a moment, often quiet and almost unnoticed, when something we have been learning begins to feel like something we can live. Not perfectly. Not all at once. But gently, with growing trust. As I come to the end of these letters, I find myself returning to where this began ~ not with certainty, but with listening. Listening to the body. Honouring its need for rest. Creating in ways that bring regulation. Allowing faith to soft
Lisa Raie
Apr 132 min read
Following The Thread…
There are pieces that are planned… and then there are pieces that arrive through prayer. This one came slowly. Thread by thread, like a quiet knowing unfolding beneath my hands. A womb. A holding. A sacred space of becoming. Within it lives our story ~ myself, my husband, and the five lives we were entrusted to nurture and carry forward. Not perfectly formed, not neatly contained ~ but woven together in love, in faith, in all that has shaped us. This next chapter of the studi
Lisa Raie
Apr 91 min read
The Lamp Within the Body Letter Eight: Community Without Explanation
To whom this letter finds, There is a quiet exhaustion that comes not from the body alone, but from the need to explain the body. To put words around what is difficult to measure. To justify why energy has changed. To describe something that shifts from day to day. For those living with complex health, this can become its own kind of fatigue. Because not everything visible on the outside reflects what is happening within. And so we try. We explain when we cancel plans. We exp
Lisa Raie
Apr 73 min read
A Quiet Inheritance: Adoration, Faith, and the Threads That Hold Us
There are moments when time feels as though it folds in on itself. Yesterday, sitting in adoration, I became aware of something deeper than memory. It was not just my own presence in that church, it was a shared presence. A thread drawing ever so gently through generations. I found myself thinking of my great grandmother, Mary Frances. How many times had she sat in that same sacred stillness? Am I sitting where she sat on those many occasions? How many whispered prayers had r
Lisa Raie
Mar 313 min read
The Lamp Within the Body Letter Seven: Gentle Strength
Dear friends, This letter brings forward how strength finds different ways of letting life move onwards and so here, there is a kind of strength that does not announce itself. It does not strive for attention. It does not measure itself against others. It does not rush. It simply remains. I have been thinking often about the women who came before me. Women who lived full and demanding lives. Who carried families, homes, grief, responsibility and often without language for the
Lisa Raie
Mar 303 min read
“I Wasn’t Meant For Drowning…”
Dear Sash Seabourne, Today, I stitched a page that carries both the weight of my past and the quiet, steady breath of healing. It is not a black page, though it could have been. Because this moment, this part of my story is no longer only about what was endured, but about what has lived through it. At the center, I placed a small photograph of myself as a child. A girl who “took every black and bruise in silence – till it coloured half my life.” A girl who didn’t yet have wor
Lisa Raie
Mar 252 min read
The Lamp Within the Body Letter Six: The Difference Between Giving Up and Slowing Down
Hi friends If you’ve wandered with me in these letters, you may have noticed something very interesting happening in the arc of the series now: Listening Rest Regulation Faith Structure And so this letter is an important threshold where I attempt to gently meet fear and untangle it. —————————— There is a quiet fear that often rises when we begin to honour the body. If I slow down ~ am I giving up? It is not always spoken aloud. But it lingers. Especially for those of us who h
Lisa Raie
Mar 233 min read
Aspire to live quietly
“Aspire to live quietly…” That line alone feels like an inheritance, doesn’t it? Not a loud legacy, not one written in grand gestures, but one stitched, worked, and lived through hands that kept going. Through days that looked ordinary from the outside, yet carried immense weight, perseverance, and devotion within them. It makes sense that it feels like it’s been delivered to me. Because in many ways, it has. https://youtu.be/RY9lyFyFB_A?si=qSlKwYZkrsy0h6bD Somewhere along th
Lisa Raie
Mar 192 min read
Studio Kre’at Is A Creative Hermitage…
“The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear.” That quote speaks into what this studio is becoming a most wonderful hermitage where silence and stillness shines with the simplest of rules: 1. Begin the day in stillness Before the world enters the mind, pause. light a candle sit quietly pray, contemplate and reflect breathe in the new day Even ten quiet minutes roots the day differently. 2. Tend the living world watering plants tending a garden sitting beneath a tree
Lisa Raie
Mar 182 min read
2026 - With The Lamp
There are words that arrive as invitations rather than plans. They do not come with strategies or timelines. They simply ask to be lived. As I step into 2026, the word given to me is “lamp”. Not a spotlight. Not a flare. Not a floodlight meant to impress or overwhelm. A lamp small enough to be tended daily. It requires attention in trimming, oil, care. It does not rush the dark away, but it does make the next step visible. Much of what will be shared here in the coming weeks
Lisa Raie
Jan 1, 20261 min read
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