The Journey Design exercise in Jaipur - The Jaipur Journey with Colouricious Holidays 8th - 18th January 2019

 A section of one of the Journeys half way through.

 Right - now where was I??? The Journey in Jaipur . . .

It might seem rather a long way to travel to do a design exercise, But I am sure you can imagine the incredible inspiration that we were surrounded by, before we even left the hotel! Your head just spins with all the shapes,lines and forms.

 A beautiful lock on a door at the Amer Fort Palace.

 Part of a fence in the paper factory we visited.

One of the many stunning domed buildings in the Maharani's Garden in Jaipur.

If you look back trough the last 2 posts you will some of the inspiration for these Journey exercises. 

We painted the first part of the Journeys in a local workshop that had plenty of space for the long pieces of paper we needed. It was cool and not too bright in the workshop, great for relaxing and concentrating on the designs.

 

 

 The group getting on with creating their Journeys.

 Regular readers of this blog will be aware that I have been teaching this design exercise for 20 or so years now. What started as something I developed to help students to create original designs when I first taught my course Experimental Textiles. I have now taught it in Australia, New Zealand the UK and Jersey. To hundreds of students. And now I have taught it in India. You just never know where your teaching will take you.

I teach the exercise exactly the same way every time I teach it, and every student creates something different. It never ceases to fascinate me.

 

 Wonderful work.

We got as far as we could in the 2 hours and the Journeys were hung side by side, This is always an exciting moment.

 

 The journeys hanging side by side . .

 And then the photo cropped down.

This exercise need to be in black and white.

If you introduce colour, you would be distracted from the design.

 I have probably taught hundreds of groups of students, and of course, they are all special. But once in a while you work with a particularly splendid group of individuals. This was such a group. They supported and helped each other along the way.  There were no prima donna's!!! The group got on so very well. This of course made my job as the tour leader much easier.

 This is my gorgeous group.

Back row -Wendy, Angie, Sara, Kath, Lesley, Karen, Maggie, Jan.

Front row - Sabine, Dian, Jenny, June, Angela and Helen.

Joyce and Sheila were missing action, but they caught up the next day.

Here are a few sections I took of the Journeys when they were hanging up.

 Great lines and shapes.

 We finished off the Journeys in the hotel garden the next day. There was time to add some more delicate (fiddly) lines to fill in a few spaces.

 As you can imagine it was delightful working in the garden with all the delights of the hotel grounds to enjoy.

 There are some very fine chandeliers in the dining room of the hotel

 The desserts were a feast for the eyes . .

Such wonderful repeat shapes. 

One of the small lounges in the hotel.

Stunning.

I will post more on how the group developed their designs and introduced colour next week. 

The holiday was through Colouricious Holidays and the hotel was the Alsisar Haveli.

***

A reminder for those of you closer to Ireland, booking for my classes at The Quilters Guild Annual Conference in Maynooth, County Kildare, closes tomorrow, the 28th. 

There are still a couple of places on All that Glitters, my newspaper based book cover and Look, Draw, Print, Stitch.  Have a look here if you are interested. It's going to be a great weekend. Conference classes

***