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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Crafted in the Factory

It was a lovely end to the week on Friday when Chris printed my Sompting design for the Virginia White Collection on his Gali machine. Monique and I print next to Chris on our hand-table  – but we have to do everything by hand – whereas he uses a Gali which has a mechanical arm… […]

Pattern making

Each time I come to design a pattern, I am overtaken by an overwhelming desire to discover the hidden order that will transform this random assemblage of marks and lines into a living whole that will dance it’s way off the fabric – it gets kind of obsessive and I find it very hard to […]

Our natural materials

Local, natural materials inspire us  – I like what we at Dora Fabrics make, to reflect and be connected to where we live. And using natural plants helps me explore my local fields and hedgerows, become aware of the passing seasons and the changing weather. This autumn when foraging for walnut husks and leaves to make my warm, glowing […]

Hand printing

We make fabric that is kind to us and to the planet – we handprint using water-based ink on 100% linen I want things in my home that are good for me, my family and the planet. I can’t make a happy home using paper and fabric that harms people and the environment and that’s […]