The beginning of the day. Early Saturday morning saw me driving to Newbury for a one day workshop that had been postponed due to family illness. As you may know, I have stopped taking bookings for one day workshops. I am just too old now for all the loading and unloading involved. The workshop was Scrumptious Spunbond (Lutradur). The car was loaded with all kind of goodies - Yes! I know, I don't do myself any favours.  There was plenty of help on hand to unload the car, with my poor old knee I need all the help I can get at the moment.  It always amazes that from an empty room we can create a space in which to play. It was a great hall, with plenty of sockets, always important with my workshops. Painting up the Bondaweb and the Spunbond. We got straight down to painting the Bondaweb and Spunbond as we needed it dry for after lunch.  The mornings activity was to try cutting out shapes from the sadly discontinued CS500 in colours with a soldering iron. Bondaweb wa

   The new book from D4Daisy www.d4daisy.com  Most of you will have seen that Maggie Grey has a new book out from D4Daisy and some of you will already have it. It is a fabulous book, full of exciting ideas. Every page had something brilliant on it - using one cutting tool or another on it - from hole punches to laser cutters. It is a very good read. The book features several of the Vilene interfacings - or 'pelmet Vilene'. I though this might be a good time to explain the differences between the 'pelmet' or 'craft' Vilenes as most of you know them. There is no such thing as 'pelmet' or 'craft' Vilene. It is a term that has been adopted to describe a firm sew-in interfacing. The correct name, or in fact, number for it is - S80 . Not very exciting - but if you don't know the number you will have trouble finding it. I sell all the medium to heavy weight iron-on and sew-in interfacings on www.nid-noi.com. I have h

  The cover of Patchwork Professional Magazine You can just picture it can't you - me sitting here at my computer in my bathrobe writing this with blue dye on my hair being incredibly excited about my second article to be published in a magazine - I feel so grown up!!! Patchwork Professional is a very beautiful German magazine the promotes all kinds of quilt art and associated textile techniques and skills. This issue has featured me as an artist and a workshop on how to use my lovely Hot Spots!   I have been given permission to scan in the cover of the magazine and two of the pages from the article. As they are scans they are not perfect but the images give you some idea. The shaggy newspaper pieces and the 'Blue Cross' image are based on the detritus that gets caught up in the steel work under our West Pier in Brighton. The 4 foot vessel on the right is one of my pieces created from CS800 that has been dyed, zapped and layered. The top image

Painted Bondaweb ironed onto a turquoise background fabric, decorated with dried seeds and leaves, jewel dots and strips of the backing paper from the Bondaweb  The first day of this 3 day course was spent showing the students the basic layering techniques we were due to cover. Once the students have got to grips with the basics they can then start zapping and stitching or whatever they fancy. First of all we painted Bondaweb and Tyvek - The Bondaweb we started to work with today (as you will see) and the Tyvek will be played with tomorrow. While the Bondaweb was drying the students ironed some plain Bondaweb onto a piece of pre-coloured Vilene Spunbond CS500. A soldering iron was then used to cut out shapes which were the ironed onto a second piece of Spunbond. Here are some of their samples -         We then experimented with transfer printing onto white CS800 - the heaviest weight Spunbond. I have my heat press here so the students had the chance to try tr