Mary's beautiful composition of painted Bondaweb, newspaper, foils, gilding flake and jewel dots - and seaweed! Every now and then in your teaching life you come across a 'super' group. 'Super' in the the way they work together, share their materials and experience and of course they produce some fabulous work. It is particularly unusual to find this on a three day course - it is something I would associate with much longer course. Nine students who have never met before with the widest divide of experience and age from 17 to much older, experience ranged from very little through City and guilds up to degrees and a PHD in textiles based subjects. "Where sheep may safely graze . . "  The view outside the workshop door - sigh . . . it is so beautiful. Of course, being at West Dean College  www.westdean.org.uk helped, what with stunning surroundings, space to work and wonderful food it would be difficult to find anywhere else more suited t

One of Emma's resist prints The second day was to be spent looking at colour and how other artists use it. The group attacked their colour wheels with gusto and managed to complete their tints and tones charts with good humour. It can be very trying to have to spend a good hour or so on very controlled colour mixing but it is very important for students to know how to mix colour. Whilst most of us use colour instinctively - colour wheels are very useful when a project you are working on just isn't working colour wise and you need to work out why . . . . The tints, tones and shades chart and a colour wheel. I won't bore you all with images of all the colour exercises we did - here are some more of Saturdays resist printing samples - As we had the dye/colourwash out, some of the student s continued their experiments with wax crayons and dye/colourwash and then taking away or discharging the colour with Milton sterilising liquid.

 One of Tracey's stitched samples using torn prints from the 2nd week-end We all had a very colourful and exhausting week-end on the 3rd week-end of Experimental Textiles at The Old Needleworks in Redditch.  We started off looking at what the group had done for home work. Part of it was to stitch into some of their prints from the previous week-end. The three images below are just a sample.      The next thing we did was to colour wash their sketch books with procion dye powder and water. You can paint all the pages in the sketch at once and wait for the sketch book to dry (it takes ages) and then you can peel the pages apart. You can't do this with paint or ink as the pages would stick together. It gives you great backgrounds on which to add any notes or samples and is much less terrifying than being faced by a book of pristine white pages. The ExTex girls painting their sketchbooks - having great fun splashing all the colour about!

  Painted Bondaweb decorated with newspaper strips, gold foil and glitter. We had another fabulous day at Foredown Tower yesterday playing with painted Bondaweb on newspaper and fabric . Playing with a technique is very important. It is much easier to learn in a relaxed environment. The group working hard. The workshop was the same as the one I taught last week but with different students so apologies for more of the same - of course it is never the same, as you will see. The images below are all painted Bondaweb on fabric decorated with foil and/or glitter and/or gilding flake - This sample is decorated with foil, strips of newspaper and grass. This one is decorated with foil and gilding flake. I love this one, I'm sorry it's not quite in focus. I just love the simplicity of it. The images below are newspaper based with all the sparkly bits at my disposal . . . There were many more fab samples which you