Following swiftly on from Shropshire the day before - I delivered a 2 day workshop - Extreme Surfaces for Stitch at InkBerrow Design Centre  We had great fun layering Vilene Spunbond backed with Bondaweb and stitched onto craft Vilene . I love teaching at this venue - the workshops are perfect for my classes. Layers of dyed Vilene Spunbond machine stitched onto dyed craft Vilene and then zapped back with a heat gun.   These beautiful samples were created by my youngest student ever - pre dyed Vilene Spunbond CS500 (yellow) had Bondaweb ironed onto the back and shapes were cut out with a soldering iron. The backing paper was then removed and the negative spaces (yellow) were then ironed onto the the black and blue backgrounds, more pre dyed CS500. Simple and exquisite! Pre dyed CS500 decorated with painted Bondaweb, sequins and glitter. This was then 'cut' into wavy strips and layered up to create a 'frothy' effect. T

 The 'crashed' newspaper, Bondaweb and Solufleece What! not MORE newspaper - Yep!!! I'm afraid so . . . . I have had a chance to catch up with some work and try some samples I have been wanting to play with. Today's task was to try 'crashing' newspaper with Solufleece. I do it all time with fabrics. (For step by step photos and full instructions go to the Solufleece page on www.nid-noi.com) To crash fabric or newspaper you need to layer from the bottom up -  1 layer of Solufleece,  2 layers of Bondaweb off the baking paper your top fabric/newspaper Layer everything up and stitch 'tram lines' about the width of the foot of your sewing machine apart through all 4 layers. You can experiment with different widths and maybe trying wavy lines once you have done your first sample. Being VERY careful not to burn yourself in your excitement - Steam your sample until it shrinks up or 'crashes'. This can be done wi

 one of the beautiful layered samples created on the Tinkering with Tyvek workshop Last Saturday night saw me dashing up various motorways from Art Van Go in Knebworth to Inkberrow Design Centre in Redditch ready to start teaching on Sunday. I was booked to deliver 3 one day workshops - On the Surface, Tinkering with Tyvek and Transforming Transfers. As I  have just posted about painted Bondaweb I will omit the images of the On the Surface workshop and go straight to the Tyvek. We had one of the best days working with Tyvek that I have ever had.  I had a great group of students, some already attending the college and some were new to the 'Inkberrow Experience'. Brenda Killigrew who is the managing director of Inkberrow Design Centre  www.inkberrowdesigncentre.co.uk/?q=front_page_alt and Castanea  http://castanea-craft-courses.com/ was around most of the time, popping in to check we were well supplied with coffee and biscuits. Brenda is a very good friend of mine and it was w

Lesley on the left and Sue on the right This is just a quick blog to say that Sue and I have sorted out the dates for the workshops in France for 2012. We have also been eating and drinking rather a lot 'Quelle surprise'!!! Sue, Lesley and I lived together at college THIRTY FOUR YEARS ago - which is amazing as we are all only 36 - Ho Ho!!!  Sue is the proprietor of Kanagaroo the mail order company for knitting yarns and accessories. She also offers and teaches Learn to Knit workshops in France in case any of you are interested. see www.kangaroo.uk.com The holiday workshops Sue and I have thrashed out over several glasses of wine are Back To Basics workshops with a little local flavour thrown in. Follow the link at the end of this post to find out more. Because there is only space available for a small number of students I thought it would be a good idea to teach beginners on these workshops as we will all have more time together. A five night holiday in the beautiful Charent

  the mandarin tree outside the studio There are 2 studios at the Castanea villa one upstairs inside the villa and one out in the garden. My group and I were working in the garden studio, One of the greatest pleasures of the week (and there were many) was picking mandarins from the tree right out side the studio. MMMmmm!  I can taste them now - delicious. The very lovely Claire Muir, who is featured in this months Stitch magazine, was teaching at Castanea last month and her students very kindly left us some fruit in the middle of the tree . . . ! This is just a selection of the work that was produced last week and in no particular order. painted Bondaweb on black cotton with heat transfer foil   painted Bondaweb decorated with with snips of polyester organza and gold flake painted Bondaweb on dyed newspaper . layers of painted 75gm Tyvek and polyester organza machine stitched together and then zapped with a heat gun. The sample above was also attacked with  soldering iron faux

the wonderful main workshop at West Dean The full title of the course was Hot Textiles - exploring layers, colour and stitch. The main products we used were newspaper (as seen in the previous post) painted Bondaweb, Tyvek, polyester organza and Vilene Spunbond. Today I will show you the samples of the beautiful work the group did with painted Bondaweb, I usually try to keep the number of images down to 8 per post but as I have so many images of the gorgeous work from this course I hope you will forgive this extended post. Bondaweb is such a versatile product, on this course we used it unpainted and ironed onto the back of Vilene Spunbond and polyester organza to create stunning applique which I will post tomorrow. This post is about painted Bondaweb.   using painted Bondaweb as a background to iron on polyester organza delicately cut out with a soldering iron   a combination process using Vilene Spunbond applied with unpainted Bondaweb cut with a soldering iron and also ironed onto p