Beautiful inspiration for design . . and colour. This is a quick post to keep you all up to date with what is happening teaching wise.  I have now finished teaching Experimental Textiles at IDC and will be offering modules from it online from January 2018. They are likely to be 6 week modules, but I will see how everything goes this year. I am going to start online teaching at the end of May this year, but they will short courses. More technique based. As my first book Hot Textiles had been withdrawn from print - I thought I might start with that!  I have so enjoyed teaching my course Experimental Textiles in various forms over the past twenty years or so, and of course, there is also the book of the same name. It is time for me to cut down on my teaching and get on with my own work. All the time I am teaching, I can't concentrate on my own work. And it is time . . . *** It was the last weekend of ExTex as it is called in short form. It was odd - seeing the group wh

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

The beginnings of something by Norah. Now for the next part . . .  The group produced a huge amount of samples - it did help having my heat press there.  It isn't always necessary to 'muck about' with your work too much. Sometimes the beauty of the process is enough. I know I can be the first one to encourage layering and stitching, but I can also recognise when it is time to stop.  This sample is just 2 prints, one on top of the other. A sheer on top and a heavier fabric underneath. Torn layered transfer prints give a very lovely shadowed effect.   These 2 layers just need a little stitch to define a few of the lines. Gorgeous. The great fun of working with synthetic fabrics is that they can be cut and distressed with heat. Cutting applique shapes to iron onto a background is one of the techniques I include in this workshop.  The student irons Bondaweb on to the back of the fabric that the shapes will be cut from. Shapes are then cut with a soldering iro