One of the 'expanded' exercises - a rectangle of black paper cut into strips and then expanded to experiment with spaces in between, or positive and negative spaces. It seems like a long time since last weekend, so much has happened.  The weekend was great fun and the group worked really hard. Foredown Tower is a great place to teach with wonderful views across the Downs and out to sea. 'Creating original designs' is a two day course designed to encourage students to look at positive and negative space and taking sections of a design.  The 'journeys' hanging side ways on. The workshop involves using three different design formulae, the journey, expanded and flipped out exercises. All these are very simple to do, in fact the whole workshop is - it's just that we never take the time out to do these kind of things. You get brilliant results, you just need to be encouraged to get on with it, so going on a workshop can

A lovely print by Jo . A few days later - I was going to continue this sooner but preparations for the photo shoot next week and my teaching this weekend at Foredown Tower just sucked time away - plus I have a new distraction . . .  My ExTex students produced some fabulous prints on our disperse dye/transfer print day. If you are not sure how to create these prints there is a chapter in Hot Textiles (Colouring your fabric) that will help.  The three prints below show some experiments with cutting and printing. A simple print showing how translucent the prints are. This print was created by printing with two different paper bags, first one, then the other. The six prints below show how using resists such as grasses and feathers can create very beautiful and simple effects. You can then turn over the resist (which is covered in dye) and then take a print from that.. Torn strips of dye painted paper over printed.

The 6th weekend of my ExTex course experimentaltextiles.com was dedicated to colouring both natural and synthetic fabrics and threads. I think it is important to be able dye your own fabrics if at all possible, it is one thing that can help make your work different. Saturday saw us dyeing natural fabrics in plastic bags with procion dyes. This is such an easy process for smallish amounts of fabric and it is always interesting to see which type of fabric comes out darkest and brightest. We were dyeing cotton, viscose and silk.   Some of the 'stashes'   As Shaun travels up from Plymouth and stays in a hotel Saturday night she wasn't able to take her dyeing home to rinse out like everyone else -so she did it Sunday morning - and for a change it wasn't raining so she could dry them in the sun.     Heidi started to layer up some of her dyed fabrics and tried a little hand stitch - very sensitive, quit lovely. After mixing up the dyes and