A detail of one of Fiona's fab prints. The first Look.Draw.Stitch weekend was a great success.  I had met Fiona, Ann and Sidella last August when I was working on the Vlieseline stand at Festival of Quilts, NEC, Birmingham. They stopped to say hello and ask how I was getting on in my new home, here in Ireland. All three ladies are from Dublin and are deeply involved in the Irish Guild of Embroiderers. We had a good chat. They asked if I was doing any teaching in Ireland and I said I was thinking of running weekend workshops from home. We discussed it further and I asked if they thought if anyone would visit the back of beyond where I live in January? And they said Yes!! They would . . . and they did.   Fiona and Ann looking out. Fiona drew some of the landscape lines and Ann drew some of the stone shapes in the dry stone wall. Sidella chose to draw Brachychiton or Bottle tree seeds that I have in a basket in my sitting room. From a simple drawing you can tak

  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 Tracey's stitched samples using torn prints from the 2nd week-end We all had a very colourful and exhausting week-end on the 3rd week-end of Experimental Textiles at The Old Needleworks in Redditch.  We started off looking at what the group had done for home work. Part of it was to stitch into some of their prints from the previous week-end. The three images below are just a sample.      The next thing we did was to colour wash their sketch books with procion dye powder and water. You can paint all the pages in the sketch at once and wait for the sketch book to dry (it takes ages) and then you can peel the pages apart. You can't do this with paint or ink as the pages would stick together. It gives you great backgrounds on which to add any notes or samples and is much less terrifying than being faced by a book of pristine white pages. The ExTex girls painting their sketchbooks - having great fun splashing all the colour about!