Who'd have thought - from a pile of paper and painted Bondaweb . . . . I have just got home from three days at West Dean College a fabulous place to teach and a wonderful place to be a student. The grounds and gardens are stunning, the house is beautiful and the workshops are purpose built, great for accommodating any kind of workshop. The workshop was Reclaimed Textiles -paper, print and free machine embroidery. The workshops are very spacious. A stack of painted and colourwashed papers. We started by colour washing all kinds of papers - newspapers, old books, atlases . . .  and painting up Bondaweb. The group then launched into my 'prettys and backgrounds' technique where the papers are torn and layered several times with the painted Bondaweb. The use of sparkle was optional for a change.    Lots of luscious layers. The torn layered backgrounds were then used as background for print and stitch. Just some of S

A delicious combination of colour and glitz. Apologies for the lack of posts recently - I seem to have run out of steam . . .  I will be catching up over the next week or so as I still have some fabulous work to show you from my Experimental Textiles group and a class I taught at Denman College earlier this month. The workshop for the Cotswolds Guild was A New Starting Point - combining the heaviest iron-on interfacing S133 with layers of torn newspaper, painted Bondaweb and all kind of glitz. Using the heavy interfacing as a backing the decorated samples can be cut to shape with a die cutting machine.   Brooch blanks cut from this sample. Some of the layered samples before they were cut to shape                  . . .  and here are some of the layered samples before and after they were cut to shape.                      Faux chenille is also a part of this workshop, it always amazes me just