Playing with printing blocks  Well, that was a month . . .  Apologies for the rather long gap between posts, I have sold and moved out of my house in Brighton. Oh my goodness - THREE skips full of STUFF!! Start de-cluttering right now if you are anything like me in keeping things - just in case you need them. You won't! This has made me re-think about how many clothes and shoes I actually need. As well as all the art and textiles media we buy and then look at and never use. We are buying time and opportunity, yet never use them!  Everything is now in storage until I move to Ireland. Since I last posted I have taught an ExTex 5 weekend and an ExTeXtra weekend. Here is a taster of what we covered . . . August 21st and 22nd saw the 3rd weekend of Experimental Textiles, ExTex for short. We are now on our 5th year at the IDC Studios and it is my last year teaching Experimental Textiles in this form - hopefully I will be teaching it onl ine by the end of next year. The 3

  Close up of Jackie's monoprint. It has been a while between posts, the closure of the mail order business generated a huge amount of interest and I was inundated with orders.  The website is now closed and I hope to be able to get all the outstanding orders posted by Thursday 3rd September at the latest. I had several offers to buy the business - but I wanted to keep the mailing list - for my newsletter and my online teaching when it eventually happens. As I am no longer tied down by the mail order business, I can travel for longer periods of time - watch this space. There will soon be news about me teaching more workshops in NZ 2017 and a new teaching tour of the United States 2017/18. It's all very exciting. *** Now back to the UK . . .  It was the 3rd weekend of ExTex 4 on the weekend of 22/23 August. The 3rd weekend means colour theory and mono printing. I know we rarely use colour theory, but is important to know how it works if there is something

One of Emma's resist prints The second day was to be spent looking at colour and how other artists use it. The group attacked their colour wheels with gusto and managed to complete their tints and tones charts with good humour. It can be very trying to have to spend a good hour or so on very controlled colour mixing but it is very important for students to know how to mix colour. Whilst most of us use colour instinctively - colour wheels are very useful when a project you are working on just isn't working colour wise and you need to work out why . . . . The tints, tones and shades chart and a colour wheel. I won't bore you all with images of all the colour exercises we did - here are some more of Saturdays resist printing samples - As we had the dye/colourwash out, some of the student s continued their experiments with wax crayons and dye/colourwash and then taking away or discharging the colour with Milton sterilising liquid.