One of Tracey's fabulous samples. The weekend saw the last ExTex session for this year. The girls have two more sessions, one in January and one in February; then it will be their end of year show at Fashion, Embroidery and Stitch at the NEC in March. - no pressure then girls!! As the last session as full dye recipes and all a bit 'concentrated', I thought it would be good for the the group to decide what they wanted to do this session. The decision was newspaper 'pretties' on Saturday and playing with Vilene Spunbond and transfer dyes on Sunday. They all had a great time throwing around glitter and gilding flake for a day, this is some of what they got up to . . . .  The following five images are the basic layered 'pretties' using old dyed and painted newspaper, painted Bondaweb and most things sparkly.       Four of the girls tearing and layering their 'pretties', lots of mess and fun. Then the girls started to cre...

  One of the 'expanded' exercises - a rectangle of black paper cut into strips and then expanded to experiment with spaces in between, or positive and negative spaces. It seems like a long time since last weekend, so much has happened.  The weekend was great fun and the group worked really hard. Foredown Tower is a great place to teach with wonderful views across the Downs and out to sea. 'Creating original designs' is a two day course designed to encourage students to look at positive and negative space and taking sections of a design.  The 'journeys' hanging side ways on. The workshop involves using three different design formulae, the journey, expanded and flipped out exercises. All these are very simple to do, in fact the whole workshop is - it's just that we never take the time out to do these kind of things. You get brilliant results, you just need to be encouraged to get on with it, so going on a workshop can...

A lovely print by Jo . A few days later - I was going to continue this sooner but preparations for the photo shoot next week and my teaching this weekend at Foredown Tower just sucked time away - plus I have a new distraction . . .  My ExTex students produced some fabulous prints on our disperse dye/transfer print day. If you are not sure how to create these prints there is a chapter in Hot Textiles (Colouring your fabric) that will help.  The three prints below show some experiments with cutting and printing. A simple print showing how translucent the prints are. This print was created by printing with two different paper bags, first one, then the other. The six prints below show how using resists such as grasses and feathers can create very beautiful and simple effects. You can then turn over the resist (which is covered in dye) and then take a print from that.. Torn strips of dye painted paper over printed. ...