Treasure       How are you at tidying up after a workshop or when you have finished a project?  I am dreadful!! I am making an effort, I have bought a few see through stacking plastic boxes to put my materials away in when I have finished teaching. How do you sort your materials and products? Colour? Textures? Products? Techniques?   Last week I taught my first 2 part workshop via Zoom to a group of students in America, Canada, and Scotland. 2 x 3 hour sessions 10am PDT/ 6pm BST. I can be in 3 places at once!! Students on the PDT time zone can work in the morning, and students in Europe enjoy an evening class.  The workshop was A New Starting Point. Featuring my backgrounds and pretties technique. We have the show and tell next week. I am very much looking forward to seeing what the group have developed from their samples.    3 book covers by Sue Redhead from the US.                                                      Sue also made some greeting cards. So - back to my messy table .

Layers of Tyvek and polyester organza stitched together and zapped with a heat gun. *** A glorious weekend   Well, what a fabulous weekend. It has been warm in the sun. It is so good to feel the heat, even if it won't be long lived. We have to enjoy the sun when we can in Ireland!!! We have unsettled weather coming up. Over the past couple of days I have been catching up with admin as well as working in the garden. I thought a catch up on my live Zoom workshops might be helpful. We had great fun on The Journey in January and Creating Unique Printing Blocks in February. The Show and Tell 2 weeks after the workshop has proved very successful, students are pleased to have an opportunity to develop their work. There are still spaces on all workshops, so if you would like to learn a new technique, or remind yourself of the fun you can have with any of these workshops, just click the link on the workshop you fancy. This month is Tinkering with Tyvek. I do so love working with Tyvek, you

  Layers of Lutradur cut with a soldering iron by Joane from Montreal, Canada When you have taught for several, verging on many, years, you build a great collections of friends, as well as students. Some you see as regularly as time allows, others pop up now and again and the joy of seeing them is very special. I have had a few reunions in the past month on the workshops, making them extra special. This is an extra blog post as I wanted to showcase some of the amazing work created on the Zap Pow! Slash and 3D workshop. We worked with various weights of Lutradur using heat guns and soldering irons to create fabulous edges and shapes. A wonderful sample combining textured Lutradur and Tyvek decorated with painted melted glue by Frances in Montreal, Canada Pieces of zapped and soldered Lutradur and textured Tyvek   Squares of zapped Lutradur on a background of painted Bondaweb with wisps of wool tops. The long silver line is melted glue by Joane from Montreal, Canada Curved shapes cut out

 A detail of one of my vessels Earth Jewels, featuring Lutradur and painted Bondaweb. This is covered in Workshop 6. Well, who knew that a catch up and show and tell 2 weeks after a live Zoom workshop would work so well? Whenever I taught workshops in the olden days before Covid, I would rock up to a workshop with a car load of supplies and samples and teach, have a great time with the students and then leave . . Occasionally students would send me images of work they had developed from my workshops, which was very satisfying.  Technology had a lot to do with it of course. In the real olden days we didn't have the amazing possibilities of digital photography and all the apps we can now use. It is incredible how we can now communicate in seconds, anywhere in the world via the internet. In my lifetime as a traveling tutor I have seen so many changes. It is quite remarkable. So - back to the present . .  My live Zoom workshops are going well, which is great. But what is going even bet