A lovely concoction of natural fibres and hand stitch. I am slowly catching up with my life - and this blog. I still have a load of emails to reply to, including yours Diana. I hope to catch up with a lot while I am up here at the the show.  Chris and Laura mucking about as we set up the stand. On this Valentines evening I am laying on my bed at my lovely guest house that we stay in when we do a show at the NEC. Laura, The other Vilene consultant, is in the room next door. We both manged to get up here despite the M40 and M1 being closed. We have set up the stand and have sorted all the materials we need for our 3 workshops. The show is Craft, Hobby and Stitch International, it's a trade show. I work with Vilene and run their retailer workshops. I am struggling with my knee at the moment, Laura is being a star and helping her old mate with the lifting and the carrying. I will write more about the show next week - now on with this post. I have sp...

  A print of one of the many excellent printing blocks. After the Quilt Symposium I travelled over to the South Island by ferry from Wellington to Picton where I was met by my mateys Denise and Christine. It was soooo good to see them again.  I had the day off the next day to mooch about with the girls then I launched into a 3 day workshop based on The Journey. It is my favourite workshop and so good to be able to spend 3 whole days on it.   The Pelorus river from the Pelorus bridge. While we were mooching we crossed the Pelorus river and the girls said I had to see the view . . . I think you can see why?   The group starting The Journey. The workshop hadn't been advertised, it was an informal meeting of some of the Blenheim Creative Fibre ladies that I met when I first taught in New Zealand 3 years ago. It was great to see them again. The group of 15 was made up with friends and other textiles enthusiasts. On the first day we got dow...

 The tutors had a short bus ride to the symposium every morning - we decided the group name for a gathering tutors should be a cacophony.  Can you imagine why?  The Quilt Symposium 2015 Palmerston North was a brilliant event. I have never been part of something so large and so very well organised. It was VERY impressive. I taught 5 one day workshops. All my workshops were full which was very satisfying - you never quite know when you are an international tutor, has anyone heard of you?  The first workshop was A New Starting Point which I wrote about in the previous post.  So - to continue . . . . The second workshop was Transforming Transfer. We had great fun painting papers with disperse dye (transfer paint) and then transferring the designs onto synthetic fabric. You can achieve fabulous layered effects with this process.  Some of the group getting stuck into painting the disperse dye (transfer paint) onto paper ready to transfer onto synth...