Experimental Textiles - Home work from session 6 - Dyeing natural and synthetic fabrics

 A lovely concoction of natural fibres and hand stitch.

I am slowly catching up with my life - and this blog. I still have a load of emails to reply to, including yours Diana. I hope to catch up with a lot while I am up here at the the show.


 Chris and Laura mucking about as we set up the stand.

On this Valentines evening I am laying on my bed at my lovely guest house that we stay in when we do a show at the NEC. Laura, The other Vilene consultant, is in the room next door. We both manged to get up here despite the M40 and M1 being closed. We have set up the stand and have sorted all the materials we need for our 3 workshops.
The show is Craft, Hobby and Stitch International, it's a trade show. I work with Vilene and run their retailer workshops. I am struggling with my knee at the moment, Laura is being a star and helping her old mate with the lifting and the carrying. I will write more about the show next week - now on with this post.

I have split the images from the 7th session of Experimental Textiles into 2 posts. There is so much fabulous work being produced I want to give you all a good idea what is happening. In this post I will show you just some of the masses of homework the two groups did after their Disperse and Procion dyeing days. 

Here are some of the natural fabrics that we dyed with Procion dyes . . .

 Playing with layers of dyed scrim and hand stitch.

 Layers of natural fabrics with machine stitch.

 A beautiful pieced sample decorated with machine stitch.

 Beautiful, subtle colours and great hand stitch.

Part of the homework was for the groups to piece some of their dyed natural fabrics together - without using a background fabric. It can be quite a challenge. They were then asked to decorate the piece with stitch. I don't teach stitch - I encourage it. The students all discover embroidery stitches by themselves or invent their own stitches.

 One of my favourites - good old running stitch.

 Onto the synthetic fabrics that have been printed with disperse dyes. More layers . . .  and more stitch.
 
 
 

 I am keeping this post brief  - I need and early night - will post about the 7th session in a couple of days. 

 Night, night all.
x x x


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