Mirjam Gielen lives in an old city in the Netherlands, works as a full-time textile artist and teacher, and has spent years building a practice rooted in embroidery on eco-printed and eco-dyed fabric. Before textiles became her full-time work, she wrote children's books and taught piano, and it was in the quiet, unstructured hours between writing sessions that textile work first became more than a hobby, a place to let her thoughts wander while she waited for new ideas to arrive. Over time, that afternoon habit grew into something she could no longer treat as secondary.
For years, Mirjam's practice stayed largely two-dimensional. Then a quieter pull towards three-dimensional work began, one she resisted at first, certain it was too complicated and not something she could do. When she eventually let herself try, the results came, but not in a way she could explain. She could make something that looked right without understanding why it worked, and that gap between doing and understanding became the quiet, nagging question that would eventually lead her to Tina Marais’ course, Soft Revolution, with Take Two.
This is the story of what happened when Mirjam stopped guessing and started listening, to her materials, to her own instincts, and to the stories both were trying to tell.
Mirjam had been surrounded by textile work since childhood. Her mother, grandmother and aunts all had some kind of thread or fabric project on the go, knitting, crochet, sewing, embroidery, weaving, and she absorbed those skills long before she thought of herself as an artist. For a long stretch of her adult life, textiles remained a hobby that ran alongside other work. Writing children's books came first, and piano teaching alongside it, until the balance between the two slowly tipped.
What drew her fully into textile art was the freedom it offered that writing never quite could. Publishing came with expectations, editors and external needs to satisfy. Fabric and thread answered to no one but her. As that freedom became more important to her, she began sharing her embroidery and eco-dyed work on social media, and requests to explain her process led her into teaching, first informally, then through tutorials and workshops of her own.
It was only when she tried to move into three-dimensional work that the ground became less certain. Her early attempts were, in her own words, trial and error. She would have an idea, work towards it, and hope it landed somewhere close to what she had imagined. Sometimes it did. She could not say why. "I felt that something was missing. There was something there, but I couldn't put a finger on it," she says of that period, describing a sense of being at a loss even when the finished piece looked fine.
Mirjam had followed Tina Marais on Instagram for a long time before Take Two entered the picture. Tina's work spoke to her in a way she recognised immediately, not because she could copy it, but because it suggested that Tina understood the very thing Mirjam felt she was missing. She studied every image Tina posted, sensing there was a depth of knowledge behind the work that she hadn't yet found in her own.
When Tina announced she would be creating a course with Take Two, Mirjam joined the waiting list on the first day it opened. There was no hesitation in that decision. She had already decided, long before the course existed, that this was someone worth learning from.
The opening module set the tone for everything that followed, though not in the way Mirjam expected. It asked students simply to wrap textile threads around objects and combine materials, with no stitching and nothing permanent. Mirjam stalled on it for some time, convinced she needed to produce something impressive straight away. It was only after rewatching the accompanying video that she understood the module was never about outcome at all. It was about getting to know the materials, feeling them, playing with them, and being willing to combine things in more than one way before settling on anything.
Once she let go of the pressure to produce something polished, the exercise became something else entirely. She found it liberating simply to wrap and combine materials with no fixed idea of what the result should look like, describing the experience as a genuine dialogue with the materials rather than an attempt to impose a plan on them. It was a small shift, but it reoriented how she would approach everything that came after.
The deeper insight came gradually, through the way Tina spoke about the stories behind materials and the reasons artists are drawn to certain images, colours or textures in the first place. Mirjam realised that her earlier three-dimensional work had been ad hoc precisely because she had never asked why something appealed to her, only whether it looked good. Tina's course pushed her to consider where materials came from, what stories they carried, and how her own inspiration connected back to the things that mattered to her personally.
That reframing gave her what she now describes as a triangle between herself, her materials and her source of inspiration, three things working together rather than one being imposed on the others. Previously, she had tended to impose a fixed idea or image onto her work. Afterwards, she found herself in genuine dialogue with both her materials and the thoughts and stories that inspired her, allowing the piece to take shape through that conversation rather than through a plan decided in advance.
One piece Mirjam made after the course captures this shift clearly. Walking in a nature area built on land where the city's old household rubbish had once been dumped, she found a large, cracked pottery shard, likely two centuries old, that had once been part of someone's plate. Rather than treating it as a found object to decorate, she wanted to honour what it had already been through. She crocheted an edge around it and created a soft pillow to hold it, the kind traditionally used to cradle precious old books, then stitched into it to represent mycelia running through soil.
As she worked, she noticed the stitching also resembled sutures, threads repairing and bringing something back together. The piece became, in her words, an act of conservation as much as a creative object, driven by a wish to protect the shard and give it somewhere soft to rest after everything it had endured. She is clear that a viewer does not need to know any of this story for the work to affect them. What matters to her is that the meaning is present in the making, whether or not it is stated aloud.
Not every piece that changed came after the course began. One had been sitting half finished in Mirjam's work basket for months, a shape she had started and embroidered before losing her sense of where it was going. After the course, she returned to it with a different question: could she combine it with other materials rather than abandon it. She added metal foil to give it a hollow, lighter top, and found herself connecting the piece to a book she was reading at the time, a science fiction novel by Brandon Sanderson describing a planet where plants float above soil too hot to root in, drawing moisture from the air instead.
The image stayed with her, appearing even in her dreams, and it gave her a way to finish the piece with petals and roots that suggested freedom rather than fixed ground. It is a small example of something larger in how she now works. Ideas from reading, memory and material experimentation are allowed to meet each other mid-process, rather than being decided before she begins.
At the time of the interview, Mirjam was building a growing collection of textile insect eggs, inspired by an image of the astonishing diversity found among stick insect eggs, a creature she remembered from her children's own childhood pets without ever having noticed anything remarkable about their eggs before. She is aiming for a collection of fifteen to twenty pieces, each made from the same basic shape but finished with different techniques and colours.
The appeal, she realised, lay in what the eggs symbolise: beginnings, things that can hatch, grow and develop, a resonance with her own hope to keep developing as an artist since the course. She sees diversity in the collection as a reflection of something she values more broadly, the ability to be entirely oneself while still belonging to something larger. "I think that is what diversity means to me, that you can be your own unique self without being separated from the rest, part of the whole," she says, a line that applies as much to her artistic identity as to the eggs themselves.
Mirjam had taken online courses before and even built her own online workshops, but she found the production quality and depth of this course unusually high, from the videos themselves through to the supporting materials. She valued being able to move through modules at her own pace, returning to earlier ones or skipping ahead as needed. The participant group added another layer of value, offering supportive, useful feedback at moments when she was unsure how to move forward with a piece.
Roughly a year after finishing, she still returns regularly to specific modules and videos, and finds that rewatching them surfaces things she was not ready to absorb the first time. She credits Tina specifically for creating a learning environment that never insisted on one right way of working. Tina shared her own process openly, without positioning herself as the only model to follow, which gave Mirjam what she describes as licence to play, explore and find her own voice rather than replicate someone else's technique.
Where the work sits now
Mirjam describes herself as closer now to being the textile artist she wants to be, someone who creates with meaning rather than simply hoping for a good result. She is honest that sharing this more personal, story-driven work publicly still feels vulnerable at times, but says the course gave her the courage to sit with that vulnerability rather than avoid it. Her hope going forward is not only to teach specific techniques, but to help others see what a technique can hold once it is connected to a personal story.
She talks about the course opening new horizons that she can now see beyond, with the sense that there will be further horizons still to find. Nothing about her account suggests the search is finished. What has changed is her willingness to keep developing rather than settling into one fixed way of making.
Asked what she would say to someone weighing up whether to take the course, Mirjam is direct: she would recommend it to anyone. She describes it as an extensive, generous body of material, module after module of techniques, tips and insight that she did not expect, delivered with a level of visual and production quality that made the learning experience feel comfortable rather than overwhelming. In her view, there is not one good reason to hold back from starting.
What stays with her most is not any single technique, though several, like wrapping fabric around buttons to create sculptural, three-dimensional forms, have already become tools she expects to keep using. It is the underlying shift in how she approaches her own work, staying longer with materials, asking why something appeals to her, and letting that answer shape the piece rather than deciding everything in advance.
She began the course hoping to learn new ways of shaping fabric. She left it having learned how to listen to it instead.