Fun and Frolics at Foredown Tower

A rather lovely book cover decoration. Newspaper layered with painted Bondaweb decorated with glitter and die cut newspaper shapes bonded onto a book cover.

Have just had a FAB three days teaching at Foredown Tower and Yes! it was using newspaper AGAIN!!! Are you fed up with it yet? I hope not, I am teaching a similar course at Art Van Go next week. This course was 'A new starting point'.


Foredown Tower is a great place to teach - it is an old water tower that now houses one of the very few camera obscura left in the country. The camera is on the top floor of the building. The views all around the building are stunning. The teaching room is on the middle floor. Both these floors are accessed by an external metal staircase, very wide and very strong but not good for disabled access. It can be a bit annoying in wet weather but it kind of adds to the charm of the place. 

 The girls hard at it.

I like teaching there so much I have booked the tower for seven weekends from October to July. As soon as I have decided what I will be teaching I will add it to my diary. I will let you all know over the weekend at the latest.


Newspaper decorated with painted Bondaweb layered with - Yep! you've guessed it, more newspaper.

A detail of the gorgeous piece above.



Newspaper layered with painted Bondaweb, decorated with glitter, gilding flake and jewel dots.


Newspaper faux chenille was included on this course.






A few of the group tried adding print to their top layer.



This piece has polyester organza layered in between the newspaper.

My leaf block was very popular for printing onto the decorated papers.






. . . . and so was my fish printing block . . . The idea is to print in a colour that is already in the work rather than introducing anything too contrasting. That way the design just 'floats' in and out of the work.


Amanda brought along her own collection of wooden printing blocks - Hello Amanda!!! My latest follower.



The following images are of book covers decorated with sections of the decorated papers.




So you can see we had a great time -  The group also made boxes by ironing the papers onto heavy iron-on interfacing. With the scraps they cut shapes with my die cutting machine to make brooches and earrings. Of course - I didn't take photos of the boxes or the brooch shapes - Duh!! It was quite an intense three days, we covered a lot of techniques, but the group coped well. I hope to see some of the girls back at the tower for my new weekend courses. They were great fun.

x

Tomorrow I will start preparing to leave for Redditch and The Old Needle Works on Friday to teach the fourth weekend of my course Experimental Textiles experimentaltextiles.com I need to sort all the gear I need to construct a large scale still life. I am very much looking forward to seeing the group again, it seems ages since we all got together.  

x

Have a great Bank Holiday weekend!




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