As darkness falls over Lake Wanaka.  Apologies for being so woefully behind with this blog, I am still catching up. This is the final post about the The Wanaka Autumn Art School autumnartschool.net.nz    With the weather changing and getting colder almost every day there were some fabulous skies over Wanaka - this is a picture of the sky as we were leaving class during the week - just beautiful. It got quite cold while I was in Wanaka. I could have done with some gloves and had to buy a fleece. I hadn't realised it would be quite so chilly. The five days that I had with my group were just a joy - they worked so hard, but also had fun. They also shared a lot of materials which always helps. I have already shown you the main work from the course, but as is usual on longer workshops, there is a chance to develop ideas . . . .   Collages of painted Bondaweb, large leaves and the odd printing block mounted onto old book pages.

  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

  This will be a quickie - This weekend will see me teaching my ExTex group at The Old Needle Works in Redditch, we will be procion dyeing on Saturday and on Sunday we will transfer printing . We should be in for a colourful time. The cake is made - all I need to do is sort out my kit and load the car . . . . x Worthing Embroiderers Guild are holding a workshop with Jill Flower  jillflower.com on Thursday October 18th and there are a few spaces left - The workshop is from 10 - 4 and is £20. Jill will showing you how to make her fabulous brooches. If you are interested please email Linda Hoddy lmhoddy@aol.com 

It's all happening this week - and it's all Bondaweb!!! I have written an article on painting and decorating Bondaweb for Stitch Magazine which is out NOW!!     Painted Bondaweb - simple and stunning Painted  Bondaweb decorated with heat transfer foils, sequins, glitter and artichoke heart seeds. Finished off with my usual very delicate hand stitch - not! If you enjoy reading the article in Stitch and want to learn more, then my new DVD Creative Bondaweb will be out on the 1st December (hopefully). Click on this link for a sneaky preview -  Creative Bondaweb Preview BUY NOW If you order before the 1st December you can buy the DVD for £18 including worldwide postage. After the 1st December it will be £22 including worldwide postage. (Please note, if you order any other products from www.nid-noi.com then postage will be applied) and - not only but also . . . I have a workshop on printed Bondaweb in the December issue of Workshop on the W