A section taken across 3 Journeys. I have reached a rather exciting and rewarding time in my own personal journey. My teaching journey. Whilst I am known for my development of surfaces to stitch onto, the course I am most pleased with is the course I wrote and developed - Experimental Textiles. It started off as a 1 year course - but my students wouldn't go away - so I wrote another year . . then another year. In the end it became a 4 year course up to diploma level. At one stage I was teaching it across 2 colleges and managing 3 first year groups, 3 second year groups . . and so on. The waiting lists were so long we had to put on extra nights and in the case of the 4th year - Saturdays.  This of course was in the days when Adult Education was properly funded. When you could write and develop your own courses. I taught the 4 year version of Experimental Textiles for 12 years. I had to stop in the end as I no longer had a life!! I thought I would never want to teach a

 A fabulous double print on the page of an old book.  The third one day workshop at The Harbour Gallery on Jersey was a fast paced version of The Journey. The group worked really hard and produced some fabulous designs. The Journey is a design exercise I developed when I wrote, developed and taught the 4 year version of Experimental Textiles in what seems another lifetime ago. I have taught this exercise as far afield as Australia and New Zealand. It always gets great results. It is also in my book Experimental Textiles, named after my course.      The 7 Journeys all lined up together.    2 sections taken from the 7 Journeys hanging on the wall.   We also played with the 'expanded' exercise that I love. Great for getting students to look at 'the spaces in between'. Taking sections from The Journeys with 'L' shapes and tracing paper. Creating original designs. Starting to cut the printing blocks from the designs. I

A fabulous print. I am slowly catching up with the blog, I taught at Art Van Go last week and am now up in Redditch teaching my ExTex 4 group. So there will be several blog posts coming up in quick succession. So - Design to Stitch for the Eastern Region Residential Weekend at Belsey Bridge conference Centre was booked almost 2 years ago - it was one of those bookings that had been in the diary for ages, and then came and went really fast. The added bonus was that my dear friend Wendy Dolan was also teaching there. We shared the journey over to Suffolk, Wendy drove which as you can imagine was a great relief. And Yes! We managed to get both lots of kit into one car. There some images of Wendy's workshop at the end of this post. Design to Stitch is basically my design workshop with more time to develop your prints with stitch. Painting the Journeys    Discussing the Journeys. The Journeys all lined up. A detail.     A selection of the exp