Beautiful Woad

I’ve tried making woad a few times – always from my allotment plants which are gradually colonising more and more of my allotment…. These beautiful stately plants with their long, grey green leaves and clouds of yellow flowers have always been slightly illusive to me – promising colour but always slightly slipping away when I […]

Patternmaking workshops

During lockdown I’ve had more time to explore and document my pattern making process – and share with other makers too. I have so enjoyed the online workshops I’ve done with students all over the world – something I would never have expected and which has been a real treat in these other wise quite […]

Slow Beauty

I’ve always been a bit of a hippie – I worked for the new economics foundation for many years where our slogan was ‘economics as if people and the planet matters’ so I’ve always been interested in alternative ways of doing things and making the radical alternative not only possible but real. When I left […]

Learning how to block print with natural dyes

This is something I’ve been fascinated by for a very long time and over the years pieces of the jigsaw puzzle have gradually fallen into place. Finally after much trial and error I have developed a simple process of block printing with natural dyes that I’m reasonably confident in and am able to reproduce and […]

Coming out as Sarah Burns Patterns

I’ve called my textile dyeing & printing business Dora Fabrics since I graduated from Chelsea – somehow it felt safer to be someone else but now I’m finally coming out as me – Sarah Burns Patterns and it feels good! Here is more about me, what inspires me and how I work (thanks to www.handprinted.com […]

Celebrating Barron and Larcher – textile designers

This is an extract of a longer talk I gave at the Steyning Bookshop on the 15th November 2018 to celebrate the launch of the book I co-edited with Michal Silver, ‘Barron & Larcher – textile designers’ Up to last year I was working as a hand printer at Ivo’s screen printing factory in Southall. […]

Printing with resists & indigo dyeing

I’ve always loved working in negative – that’s the printer in me. When you cut a lino block you remove the parts you don’t want to keep so that the final image is the result of the all the marks you didn’t make…. if that makes sense. I’ve experimented with lots of different ways of […]

How a design goes from hand block print to factory screen print…

My wood block ‘Honoria’ for the Virginia White Collection was in this months ‘House and Garden’ and it reminded me that I’d written a blog all about how the design came about and developed from a messy wood block into a finished, beautiful fabric and wallpaper. It was a fascinating process for me as it […]

Elizabether Friedlander – designing against the odds

By lovely chance (I was just dropping off some more tea towels and pouches at the shop), Alice and I got to go along to the private view of the new show at Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft –  Elizabeth Friedlander: Typographer, Calligrapher, Designer. Elizabeth was a design prodigy, commissioned to design her own […]