Printed and painted Bondaweb lifted off the backing paper, torn and ironed into place onto a canvas decorated with more painted Bondaweb an old newspapers.  I have had a few days to play - a rare treat. I have been making samples for the new show at Excel next week and for my upcoming workshop at West Dean College. Solufleece and the new self adhesive Solufix are very popular at the moment. I thought you might like to know about printing onto Solufleece. Teaching across the country as I do it is very apparent that many of you are not confident in your drawing skills. A way around this is to use printing blocks, your own or commercial designs. As Solufleece is water soluble you would think that printing onto it with (wet) paint would make it dissolve - not if you stretch it first.  A selection of wooden blocks from Art Van Go www.artvango.co.uk    Boxes of blocks in many designs as well as single designs are available from Colouricious www.col...

   Two of Tracey's stitched colour samples. Well the show was less busy than previous years but that is hardly surprising considering we had so much snow.  Many thanks to all of you who braved the weather, it was wonderful to see you. It was a bit of an emotional few days with the knowledge that I wouldn't being seeing 'my girls' for while. Their course has now finished and we are recruiting for the next course which starts at the end of May. I know I will see them again, just not so regularly. I know you are not supposed to get attached to your students - but you can't help it when you have been together for just under a year.     One of Tracey's experiments with the Classic Pelmet Vilene.   One of Shaun's stitched print samples.   Heidi created a brilliant wall piece to illustrate her interest in D and T.  The piece had sections that moved and lit up. It is a very exciting piece. Sally created so much work she coul...

   Just in case you thought I was slacking . . .  So - we have had a busy two days at Fashion, Embroidery and Stitch and.the weather doesn't seem to have put the visitors off, which is great. A huge effort goes into putting on this show and it would be a great shame if it wasn't seen by thousands. My Experimental Textiles students are showing their course work and some finished pieces alongside the catwalk. The ten metre stand is bursting with energy. I am so proud of my girls, they have done me proud. They have been taking it in turns to steward the stand and they are enjoying talking to the visitors and explaining what we get up to on the course.     Beginning to sort the hanging order. . . .      The finished exhibition.    A closer look at the design exercises the students use to take sections from to create printing blocks.    Some of the finished work and more considered samples.   ...

Chocolate wrappers free machine stitches with the help of Solufix and Solufleece. Oh how I suffer for my art!!! I love the bright, shiny colours of chocolate wrappers and enjoy using them as flashes of colour in my work. When ironed lightly between baking parchment they texture like Tyvek but remain soft enough to stitch into. They do ping about a bit if you try to free machine them but with the new Solufix I have no more trouble with them. Solufix is a self adhesive water soluble fabric on a strong backing paper that is removed to reveal the sticky side of the Solufix. Because the backing paper is so firm it means you can run it through an ink jet printer, print your design, remove the backing paper and then lay threads around your design and free machine to your hearts content. You may need to cover your threads with a layer of Solufleece if any of the glue is exposed. The glue will not affect your machine needle.    I stuck all my chocolate wrapper strips to the...

Hot Textiles has been translated into Spanish - Whoo hoo! The journey home from Glasgow on Monday was a bit scary - well the first bit of it was anyway . . . .The M74 was very, very, frightening. One minute there was a reasonable amount of snowfall - The next, there was a whiteout. The traffic ground to a halt and we sat around for a while, an hour or so and then we started to move, slowly. With the ever useful travel information on the radio we were informed of an accident that had closed the motorway several miles ahead. We eventually diverted off the Southbound M74 via Lesmahagow, to return to a much faster moving M74. On the Northbound M74 there was a horrible accident involving two lorries and several cars. The scene certainly made me drive much more sensibly than usual . I delayed my journey home to Brighton as I heard on the travel news that the M23 was blocked with poor drivers stuck in the snow, most of them all night! Luckily my best fri...