My wife, Laure Petiot, who has died of non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma aged 60, taught people how to make stained glass and jewellery, as well as how to craft objects from silver.
Born in France, she had been an adult education tutor in Cardiff for the past 28 years, having ventured to London in 1976 to learn English, and to work in hotels and restaurants. She changed tack after getting a job in a stained glass workshop in Camden Lock, north London, assisting with making glass lampshades, windows and mirrors. This led her to study architectural stained glass at the West Glamorgan Institute of Higher Education in Swansea (now Swansea Metropolitan University), which was headed at the time by Tim Lewis.
After completing her course at Swansea, Laure made and sold glass at craft fairs and in craft shops in Cardiff and took on commissions for domestic stained glass windows. She became an adult education tutor in 1989 at the Howardian Centre in Cardiff, where she worked until her death. Soon she was taking 10 classes a week, working both in the daytime and in the evenings. While she was very talented and enjoyed all kinds of creativity – she was also interested in spinning and weaving, and later took up painting – her greatest contribution was as a teacher.
Her commitment to her students often extended to helping them set up their own workshops. Her classes contained a mix of new and returning people, with many attending for more than 10 years and a few for more than 20. Her oldest pupil was 94, and they celebrated each of his birthdays in the class with cakes and drinks.
Her teaching allowed for long summer breaks, and Laure spent six weeks each year in France, where she had been born in Épernay to Nicole (nee Demarquet), a special needs teacher, and André Petiot, who worked in a bank until switching to run a bookshop in middle age. She went to Lycée Jean-Moulin in Béziers before making her decision to come to Britain.
For Laure, exhibiting and selling her work took second place to her teaching, but nonetheless she often displayed and sold her smaller glass pieces, glass jewellery and silver jewellery. Over the past three years she showed her painting in two shared exhibitions, one of them at the Canfas gallery in Cardiff.
She is survived by me, our children, Stefan, Marianne and Tom, her parents, and her siblings, Élise, Francis and Rémi.
