Time and trifles ...

Back in the swing with hands a strange shade of orange/red after a day preparing for teaching dyeing. On Saturday we are looking at hot dyes, cold dyes and dry dyes - all in one session! My main hope is that the poor participants manage to remember what went in which dye at what time and what fixative they used! For reference I like to use Jane Dunnewold's Art Cloth, Bailey Curtis's Dyeing to Colour and Ruth Isset's Colour on Cloth.

The three (wise?) monkeys!

For the rest of the time I was preparing for a family visitation from the US, having a family visit and recovering from a family visit!! A lovely time with plenty of eats, drinks and walking it off around Derbyshire.

I've seen a couple of these 'Money Trees', this one is in Dovedale, I have got to use those colours and textures at some time.

In between that, a fantastic trip to Northumberland and Lindisfarne - though my pictures seem to have disappeared into the electronic ether - to share working on metal with a textile group and catch up with some long time friends.
And, sorrow of sorrows, the old Volvo, having been decorated for the prom, finally went to heaven as a banger racer (for seven laps at least!).



Here's how she looked afterwards:

There are two new workshops which I am running next week and have been working on:

The first is called 'Getting to Know You' and will allow the nervous newbies to get started on free machining or reassuring the tentative occasional free machiners to really get over the worries that seem to accompany the craft. I hope that they will be creating something like this with their samples from the day.








The second day is called 'What Lies Beneath' and is based on reverse appliqué methods but with metal as the base layer, so that glints of the metal show through the layers of fabric.

Dupion silk layers over burnished copper.

Detail from the above piece - I love the way the silk frays and rather than hide this, I have deliberately accentuated the frayed edges.