This May, I was lucky enough to travel to Ghana –  something I have wanted to do for a long time.

Inspiring conversations over the years with friends who had returned, like John from Ivo’s and with designers like Chrissa Amuah & fellow printer Monique had always made it my number one travel destination but it wasn’t until my lovely cousin Shash offered to meet me anywhere in the world – that I was able to book our flights and start planning our trip.

Now, I’m back – I really want to hold onto the many wonderful things that I learned and I thought by sharing some of them here I could help the love travel a bit further. 

So here goes:

1. Everyone is a Maker

Making & creativity is everywhere – from the beautiful school dresses being sewn on every street corner, grass mats being woven, fabric being printed, food being cooked and incredible cooking bowls being carved and patterned from calabashes… making is everywhere!

In Ghana, making is an everyday activity that brings creativity and beauty into daily life. Making is not fetishised, it’s just something you do everyday to make things that you use and enjoy. Creativity brings the streets alive with wonderful sights and sounds – like the sound of the knife grinder and the sewing machine. It made me realise how empty and dead are streets are in comparison, how little we make ourselves and how de-skilled we have become.

2. Pattern & Beauty is Everywhere

I really felt like people relished creating pattern and beauty through everyday things – arranging a pile of fruits for sale, matching a dress fabric with a bow, a young girl wearing a design of young shoots…and taking joy from these simple, everyday acts. It was a big reminder to me to live in the everyday and appreciate the beauty of all the everyday things I have around me.

3. Respect for the Spirit world 

While we were staying in Accra we noticed how little music there was and our neighbours told us this was because it was the Homowo festival, when the Ga people around Accra, show respect for the gods by refraining from playing music in preparation for the planting of the crops in May and the beginning of the rainy season when they hope their gardens will grow and be blessed with fertility. How wonderful to still be in sync with the fertile year – even in a city!

Ghana seemed like a very moral society with no visible drinking or drug taking on the street – this made it feel incredibly safe.

Adinkra symbols are woven into everyday life, for example the 5 interlocking circles of ‘Kuntin Kantan’ symbolising humility and the ‘Oneness of humanity inspite of Difference.’

And cars and trucks are painted with brilliant slogans. These are some of my favourite: 

Give and Take

God’s Time is the Best Time

This Far by Grace

Thank you Shash for a wonderful holiday and for all the families and artisans who hosted us and shared their knowledge, skill and passion.

The post What Ghana taught me appeared first on Sarah Burns Patterns.

I was fascinated but my friend told me not to worry – the whole city was covered with beautiful rangoli…and so she proved right. Scattered on pavements  through out the leafy streets of Bangalore were hundreds of these intricately drawn, fragile motifs, no two the same, renewed each morning and fading away through the heat and under the feet and business of the day.

‘They are patterns which reflect a whole cosmic universe in miniature. They are drawn each day by the children and women of the house as a way of propitiating the spirits entering their home – offering them order, harmony and in return requesting peace and blessings.’

Returning home, I noticed that we too had our own daily rangoli artist – Geeta the cook. She filled my sketchbooks with beautiful drawings  and gave me a live demonstration.

Another friend, Samooki turned out to be the daughter of a priestess and temple keeper and was an expert in drawing patterns with out end…

Now back home, with my own rangoli rice powder, I think about how I could make my own rangoli patterns in the street outside my home and what they would look like…

They might provide a subtle orientation to my day and our home, I’m sure, like saying a prayer help to connect us to the day and everything that will unfold and pass away within it.

The post Sacred Pattern I saw my first rangoli on the steps of the Bank of India – an intricate chalky pattern half washed away by the morning rain. appeared first on Sarah Burns Patterns.

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 try to convert their promise into dye, always sticking a little too yellow or losing their blue rather quicker than I would like.

I’ve kept an indigo bath for years – always added to and rarely cleared out in which I dye metres and metres of linen and hemp. But the indigo I have traditionally used are the cakes of tropical indigo you can get from places like Cloth House. I follow a recipe, I like to think – given to me by Phyllis Barron. It’s a photocopy of her typewritten recipe that I found at her archive in Farnham.

But my woad plants were always there – reminding me of another kind of blue and offering me something I know will be special and most especially an opportunity to discover something new and ancient. So I was thrilled to harvest my woad and join lovely Debbie Manson & Clare O’Leary over in Lewes for a lovely day of woad dyeing – plus so thrilling to leave Steyning!!

I wanted to share the process we shared together with you. If you are a beginner or maybe already had a go with woad, I thought you might find it interesting.

1. I harvested my woad fresh from the allotment. First we shredded the fresh leaves & stood the shredded leaves in boiling water for around an hour.

2) Next we strained off the liquid and shifted the PH of the bath to make it more alkali PH8/9. We did this using Soda Ash. A successful indigo bath must be alkali – this is one of it’s key characteristics

3) Next, we aerated the bath – essentially introduced more oxygen by pouring it from bucket to bucket. We did this for about 15 minutes until the bath was nice and foamy and blue.

4) Finally we used a teaspoon of Sodium Hydrosylphite to remove the oxygen and create our lovely yellow dye bath.

We left the bath to rest for about half an hour before introducing the cloth.

5) These were left in the bath for at least 10 minutes before being removed and quickly placed in a bath of cold water and vigorously agitated – does that make sense?

As we did this – the cloth turned properly blue and seemed to fix really well. So a brilliant idea – thank you Clare!

And a BIG thank you to Debbie for welcoming us into her wonderful workshop garden studio – our time together was really joyful collaboration, play & togetherness.

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One of my favourite capitals is a circle of carved oak leaves – I just love how the stone masons brought nature in from the outside and made the stone come alive.

John Ruskin was a big fan of their bringing the outside in approach in such a free and effortless way. I learned all about his love of medieval sculpture when I visited and researched the amazing Tyntesfield House near Bristol

This is the feeling I wanted to create when I designed my Sussex Oak design – partly inspired by the carvings but also influenced by local patternmaker Peggy Angus who lived not far away. Do visit her archives at The Keep near Brighton if you can. Many of her wonderful prints are boxed up as she left them – she worked with such energy. Partly because she had to (she was a single parent) but also just because she was just that kind of person. She had quite particular views about history and as a teacher designed a wonderful scheme of how each age developed it’s own patterns. She got the students at North London Collegiate School for Girls to paint this as a mural around their art class. She was interested in the meaning behind patterns and this is one of the reasons why she inspires me so much.

My Oak Leaf pattern has been in my mind for over 20 years since I made a little oak leaf print many years ago – sometimes I work very slowly and I just needed the extra time offered by lockdown and my connection to the beautiful church carvings to finally finish the design.

When it came to cut the block I worked in my usual way, cutting and printing and recutting and reprinting until the design had that sense of movement and balance that I seek to create in all my designs.

I printed it onto fabric and paper and because we were in lock down and I had more time, I started to paper our hallway  – the colours made me very happy. I’ve also been printing it onto fabric that I mordant with oak galls that I forage for in the fields around me here in Steyning.

I’m pleased other people like this design – I feel it connects me to the past and also offers some ideas about how we might go forward in the future – making beautiful textiles that are kind to the environment.

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