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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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 Chelsea College of Art 5 years ago I got a job as a hand printer at the wonderful Ivo’s screen printing factory in Southall. The printers who work there are rare and wonderful master craftsmen capable of printing 25 colour chinzes but there is an incredible amount of waste and pollution involved in the process. And Ivo’s is only small – the textile industry as a whole is responsible for more greenhouse gases than air travel & maritime shipping put together. That’s why Extinction Rebellion has been campaigning at London Fashion Week and why I decided that when I came to set up my own workshop in Sussex I would try to clean up my act and develop my work using natural dyes and use organic fabrics where ever possible.

Thanks to lovely Jaine McCormack  and the team at Guy Goodfellow in Chelsea, I was able to launch my naturally dyed collection at their  Showroom 2 years ago. Since then I’ve been on a really steep learning curve – educating myself as well as my clients as we gradually explored the idea of seasonality, reusing valuable fabric where appropriate  (I remember one interior designer’s shock when I suggested that we re-dye her curtains!) and the notion that using natural materials means that nothing can be reproduced exactly the same – instead variation and difference should be embraced and celebrated.

Then I came to research my book into the wonderful 1930’s block printers Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher. I spent a whole winter transcribing Phyllis Barron’s talk – ‘My life as a Block Printer’ which she gave in 1962 at Dartington, nearly 30 years after she closed her workshop down and stopped printing altogether. Her talk shares in detail the trials and tribulations of a life times obsession with a few simple dyeing and printing processes which she had to pioneer herself – not unlike William Morris.  Indigo, cutch and iron were her materials and although she left no technical notes – her commitment over decades to perfecting these difficult processes inspired me to deepen my practical research – a journey I’m still very much at the beginning of.

I’m now really into the natural colour palette and relish the sensuality and seasonality of the whole process. It’s been wonderful to work alongside Alice Garner and form the Steyning Imprint together – making things together and teaching others. Her interest and knowledge in the natural world plus her creativity and attention to detail makes her fab partner to work with. Having a flock of sheep really helps when it comes to providing the wool filling for our South Downs cushions.

Together we’ve come up with a few ways to make what we do as sustainable as possible. Alice is making beautiful sketch books using recycled coffee cups and we are trying to source more organic hemp – woven small scale to print our vegetable dyes on. Thanks to Alice’s sheep plus some neighbouring farmers who have been very generous we are now in the process of producing South Downs wool cushion pads. We’re trying to really cut down on waste – all spare scraps of fabric are used to overprint labels on or sew into lavender bags. By thinking about our supply chain and how we can make a positive difference we are also reaching out to others who share the same values and vision – it’s been really empowering to discover how many like-minded people are out there and to start supporting each other.

It’s just a beginning and only a drop  in the ocean but it makes me want to keep making – not just so there is more stuff for people to buy – but because the way we’re doing things is helping to pioneer a different way of living and working. It keeps me feeling positive and feeling excited – we’ll be at the Downland and Weald Christmas Fair from the 23rd – 26th November & would love it if you came and said hello or do please get in touch if you are doing something similar – we would love to hear from you.

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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 for originally publishing this blog)

About me – Sarah Burns Patterns

When I’m designing, I start with an initial idea and cut my block vey soon as print making is an integral part of designing for me. I’ll keep printing and cutting and changing the block, editing the idea as it develops and being attentive to detail, colour, marks & scale… My goal is to create something that creates both harmony & movement – at the same time.

Although I went to Cambridge and studied politics, I had a lovely friend who was at art school and we used to block print together – after that I never really stopped even though I was working in a very different field (community economics where I met my husband the writer David Boyle). When I was 40 and my youngest son went to school full time I decided to take the plunge and applied to Chelsea to study textiles – I could cycle there and back to Crystal Palace in time to pick up the kids up. Studying with lots of super talented 20 year olds was terrifying (I was the only mature student) and exhilarating at the same time. I got a first class degree and learned how to work very hard & really shifted in my approach to colour and design.

When I was in my second year at Chelsea I started interning with Michal at Christopher Farr Cloth; she took me to the wonderful Ivo’s screen printing factory in Southall and when I graduated I got a job there as a handprinter. I worked at Ivo’s for 3 years, commuting between Sussex and Southall and probably learned more there than I did at college – about colour, technique and the craft of printing. I wasn’t very good at it but it gave me a unique insight into commercial production and English manufacturing. The waste and toxicity of the process also made me want to do things differently so when I set up my studio in Steyning I decided to work in a way that was kinder to the environment – I do believe that beautiful things should be made beautifully otherwise they aren’t really honest.

I’ve just spent two years researching and writing a book on the 1930’s block printers Phyllis Barron & Dorothy Larcher –who combined block printing and natural dyes. Their work has really inspired to work even more with natural processes.

One of the reasons I love print because it intervenes between my intention and the final outcome – it always surprises me and acts like an unknown collaborator. I also love that I am working in reverse – removing the line that I don’t want to print. I’m drawn to resist printing for the same reason. Colour and pattern is also very important to me – it’s a very emotional and playful thing in my life.

 I now feel very spoilt and have a workshop cum garage in Steyning where I live. I do most of my dyeing outside using whatever plants, fruits or roots are available seasonally and I always have an indigo vat on the go. I also grown lots of dye plants on my allotment and try to get up there most days with my dog Gwennie. Being outside and part of the seasons is very important to me – I try to plant something everyday, even if it’s just a handful of seeds thrown into cracks in the pavement.

I’m at my most creative first thing in the morning so I try and get all my blocks, fabric & colour prepped the night before so that I can get up early start printing first thing. The process of dyeing and printing has a definite rhythm to it and it’s one that definitely shapes my days and weeks. I normally print or dye all morning and then get on with other tasks in the afternoon – like preparing orders, organising workshops, talking to clients etc After supper, I often like to cut blocks as they are lovely and soft if you sit on the lino as you eat. In the evenings I’m not good for much excepting getting ready for the next day and maybe doing a bit of website admin. I often find that as I fall asleep problems that have been bugging me all day untangle themselves and new images float into my mind just as I doze off …

I’ve been print making for nearly 30 years – it sounds astonishing, especially to me. I’ve had some great teachers – Vivien Lodge at the Working Men’s College in Camden, Kathy Round & Mel Bowles at Chelsea, Podge at Ivo’s in Southall and my children – have all helped me develop in new and better ways. I remember reading somewhere that you don’t master any craft until you’ve put in at least 30,000 – I’m probably reaching the quota now.

I’m originally from South Africa I’m really inspired by the traditional shwe shwe cloth or German print that is worn traditionally by domestic servants – I’ve named one of my recent designs Margaret after the lovely woman who looked after me and my brother when we were little. I love vernacular arts and crafts – like the beautiful Romanesque carvings and medieval wall paintings you find in ancient churches around Steyning. Their bold colours and rthymic patterns are really wonderful. They are very honest and direct, made by incredibly talented and unknown craftsmen. I also like the immediacy and vitality of Peggy Angus for the same reasons. I especially like that she thought about and understood some of the reasons behind pattern making; for me making patterns is full of meaning and emotion and she devoted her life to teaching more people about that.

The actual process of pattern making and printing is what inspires me most – the fabric I begin with, the process of mordanting, preparing the dyes from roots and berries and the act of printmaking itself – at each stage materials change and marks alter, the smells, tastes and feelings – it’s a very sensual process and one I’ve become completely captivated by.

I also love drawing and I mark the beginnings of a holiday by starting to draw as much as I can all the time, everyday – I have lots of sketchbooks. When I’m most relaxed I dream about drawing.

The textile I am most proud is my map of world patterns – it took me several years to make. I collected stories from people all around the world and sewed their patterns onto a massive patchwork quilt of the world. The project taught me so much about our relationship to pattern and how patterns travel and change through culture, tradition and people http://unsewn.blogspot.com/2010/

There are a few pIaces where I sell my naturally dyed and hand printed fabrics: firstly through my website www.sarahburnspatterns.com

The lovely people at Guy Goodfellow Collection http://www.guygoodfellow.com also keep my work at their showroom in Chelsea. Virginia White has several of my designs in production as part of her fabric and wall paper collection http://virginiawhitecollection.com/fabrics/

and my friend Alice Garner and I run the Steyning Imprint together – making tea towels and other lovely things for sale through our etsy shop http://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/steyningimprint

Up coming projects include lots of events around my Barron and Larcher book which I co-authored with Michal at Christopher Farr Cloth. I’ve also been involved in helping with the Women’s Work show at Ditchling which celebrates craftswomen who turned their practice’s into successful businesses between the two World Wars – including Ethel Mairet, Alice Hindson, Phyllis Barron & Dorothy Larcher, Enid Marx, Catherine ‘Casty’ Cobb, Katharine Pleydell- Bouverie, Denise Wren and Elizabeth Peacock. It’s on until October so catch it if you can

My partner Alice and I will be doing a Barron & Larcher inspired workshop at Handprinted in West Sussex in November. I’m really exited to be following in their footsteps – pioneering low-tech, non-toxic textile making.

My advice for other printmakers and creatives is:

*Follow your passion and be brave

*Work hard and keep going – stamina is just as important as talent

*Try and learn something from everyone you meet – everyone has something to teach you

*Find good people to work with – the ideas you have together will nearly always be better than thoughts you have alone and they will be there to keep you going when you run out of steam

*Don’t be afraid to ask for advice and enjoy yourself!

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Up to last year I was working as a hand printer at Ivo’s screen printing factory in Southall. I wasn’t very good at it but I loved being part of the production process and learned so much about colour, pattern and how to make things commercially.

My job was to help experiment with colour and scale to get the design absolutely right before the client spends squillions and it goes into production. Michal from Christopher Farr Cloth brought some of Barron & Larcher’s designs into the factory for us to sample and even more amazing was that the lovely archivist at the Craft Study Centre Jean Vacher came along with original fabric & I got to see Barron & Larcher’s designs for real. They were different from anything I had ever seen before – delicate, discharged prints onto very fine lawns and silks, so different to the prints we were making – positive pigment prints onto heavy linen. I was captivated by them and asked Jean if I could visit the archive in Farnborough.

And this is the woman I discovered when I got there – Phyllis Barron – here she is in 1961 at Dartington Hall, about to give a speech called ‘My Life as a Block printer’.

She hasn’t printed for 30 years and all her fabrics hang behind her. There’s a wonderful kind of poetic justice to this picture as she is returning to the place where 40 years before Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst had invited her to decorate their home. This is how she began her speech:

We were rich. My father was ‘something in the City’, We had no friends, only relations, who came to lunch on Sundays. They never stopped talking for one minute, comparing the sizes and heights of their children. But their husbands were completely silent.

Well, I found her voice utterly compelling & I went back to Michal at Christopher Cloth and suggested that we do some kind of mongraph – as Barron’s story needed to be heard more widely.

This is Barron describing her first taste of freedom at the same time as beginning to experiment with her first printing blocks.

 When I was fifteen my sister took me to France to a sketching and painting class I thought I was in heaven. We stayed in a very primitive little auberge. I really felt I had begun to live, because nobody told me to wash; and we wore overalls all day. One day Fred returned from a sale with a collection of wood blocks he had bought simply for their beauty. “I’ll think they’ll make a fine wall decoration and I’m going to hang them up’, he said. But I was mad to know how they really worked. However, we thought we’d try to get some patterns from them, and of course we started all the wrong way. We tried a few rubbings in pencil, but that wasn’t very satisfactory because all the little pins in the block broke through the paper. So we tried oil paint, which was the only thing we had handy, printing on glass, which was of course far too hard and unyielding. We tried printing with oil on paper, which was softer, but the print was very uneven, and we were very impatient. We left it, put the glass, the oil paint and all into the baby’s bath and went out to paint. When we returned we got into great trouble. Mrs. Mayer had put the baby into the bath on top of the paint. We were told we musn’t do any more experiments.

Of course this didn’t stop Barron, the wonderful thing about her was that she didn’t give up. She was completely self taught – from old 18^th century recipe books which she said read like novels. Her first discovery was how to take colour out of indigo and it was her friend, Therese Adeneny who made etchings with nitric acid that gave her a clue by telling her how the acid made little white dots on her indigo apron…This design – Large Feather shows how far Barron had developed from those early experiments of splashing acid onto indigo, allowing the acid to burn holes and destroy her blocks: she has gained complete control over her process.

Barron had several indigo bath disasters. Her first experiment started a house fire when she tried to keep the bath warm with a blanket and it caught fire. For the second one she tried the recipe using urine which she collected from her friends around Hampstead – with disastrous consequences, as she describes:

I had a friend coming to lunch, and I had everything ready when I realized I’d forgotten the bread, and run out to get it. When I came back I found my urine vat flowing down the stairs to meet me – and a very furious friend saying “what a disgusting smell. Whatever have you been doing now?” I hadn’t realized that urine boils at a very low temperature (or high or whatever it is).So my second vat failed, and I was very depressed about it. We had lunch out, and I cleaned up when my friend had gone.  Meanwhile the war came. For the first six months of the war I went to a hospital in Belgium, where I had no chance of doing anything at all except cooking and things –I leant a lot about cooking, whereas I could hardly make a cup of coffee when I started; and as I was fairly solid I was sometimes used to sit on the wounded during operations.

This is Barron’s first wood block from 1915, it’s called Log. But her disastrous experiments continued …

I was now beginning to tire of spots, and was getting down to the business of getting a design on to the block. and my first block was wood. It was fire-wood from the mills, and I used the grain of the wood as the pattern. Finally to give it more flow I printed it upside down. It was before I had a steamer, and I washed it before it was ready and the whole design washed out. I sold this design later to the Calico printers’ Association, where my sister worked, and they made it into such a horrible thing, with such dreadful colours, that I can’t bear it now.

But of course she didn’t give up and here are some of her beautiful later blocks.

She sent her fabric to Ethel Mairet, a well-established arts and crafts weaver to ask her advice & Mairet loved her things and encouraged Barron to do more. Barron started selling with Mairet – here is how she describes one sale at Westminster Central hall

A lady next door to me sold brooches made of fishbones, and on the other side decorated jam jars with oil paint. Mrs Mairet was somewhere right across the hall, and I felt very lost, and had to console myself with Guinness.

It’s time, to introduce Dorothy Larcher. Her story reads like something out of Passage to India – at the outbreak of war in 1913 she was helping Lady Heringham make copies of the Ajanta Cave paintings and couldn’t get a passage home (until 1921!) so she stayed for the duration of the war and learned the art of Indian block printing.

Dorothy’s style was quite different to Barron’s – more delicate, floral even and contrasted well with Phyllis’s bolder more graphic designs.

Their block printing business was doing quite well – when they received their biggest commission yet – to design the interiors for the Duke of Westminster’s yacht, The flying Cloud

The yacht had forty cabins, each with divans, bunks and curtains, and an enormous saloon in the middle, and Detmar wanted B&L’s stuffs for all of it.

Of course it was delightful to think about, but until then I had never produced more than about 20 yards of any one thing, and even twenty yards is very heavy when wet, and you have to wash the stuff may times, so it rather took my breath away. But when he added, you have three weeks to do it !!

It was a huge amount of work and they worked day and night to get it done.

Through the Duke they met Chanel, who was his mistress at the time. She (Chanel) thought I was a very queer sort of person – she couldn’t understand why I should want to do this strange thing. I was dressed as usual entirely in my own stuff, all made by myself, and I don’t think she had ever in her life seen so much hand sewing, which she really quite appreciated.

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I’ve experimented with lots of different ways of doing this on fabric – using bleach is really powerful if a little toxic. And there are resist binders you can buy commercially but I prefer a lower tech approach that’s safe to use and completely harmless to the environment.

That’s why I was so thrilled to have three different resist print techniques to explore with at this Springs Wild Textile workshops – ‘dhabu’ or Indian mud printing, ‘Adire’ Nigerian cassava paste & ‘Katazome’ Japanese rice paste, which Honami brought so kindly from Japan.

To make the mud resist we collected mud from the River Adur and mixed it with chalk from the hill & some gum arabic. The chalk had to be pounded until it is very fine – this is the hardest part.  When the resist was ready it smelt of the river but also of the sea (it has a high salt content as the Adur is very tidal near us) and was a lovely smooth consistancy, a pleasure to handle and squish through our stencils, also to flick as we discovered.

Next was the ‘Katazome’ or Japanese rice paste resist which was probably the hardest resist to prepare and involved mixing the rice flour with the rice bran (a kind of poetry here as the rice kernal is re-united in this way) & then steaming it like dumplings. The final resist was very silky and we could apply it with a icing funnel (?) as well as comb through it and make very fine lines.

‘Adire’ or cassava paste resist was relatively simple by contrast. I mixed half a cup of cassava flour and half a cup of water and cooked them together until they made a porridge. This I sieved to get ready of any lumps. Cassava was lovely to apply and once again we were able to make very fine lines through it.

All the resists were left to dry overnight and much of the next day when they could really bake in the sun. They then went into the indigo bath – the mud for the shortest dip, then the cassava, then the rice paste.

The cloths were left to fully oxidise and then we rinsed off the resists and were left with the final prints…

We all agreed that the next thing was to try and combine the different techniques, using what we now know about their different qualities. If you are interested in resist printing and indigo do get in touch about joining the next workshop, which will be in September.

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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 typeface (‘Elizabeth) straight out of college in 1930’s Germany. The typeface was to be called ‘Friedlander’ but due to the prevailing anti-semitism of the time, it was changed to the less Jewish sounding Elizabeth.

On the brink of commercial success as a typographer and illustrator in Germany, Elizabeth instead had to flee for her life, first to Italy and then to England, where she found work as a domestic servant.

Her skills and talent proceeded her, however and she found work designing advertising logos for The Times, Shell and beer mats! She also designed the lovely twirly Penguin logo. All her work is instantly familiar and recognisable and I found that I had several covers she designed for Penguin in the 1960’s, which I was already rather fond of. Now of course, they are firm favourites and have been rescued from our dusty poetry book shelves. You’ve probably got a copy of ‘Contemporary Verse’ or even the ‘Penguin Book of Italian Verse’ tucked away somewhere… I have to admit that rather superficially, mine was bought for the cover not the contents.

Friedlander’s work is resolutely un-English, it’s not trying to be naive, folky or simple in that Bawden-esque way. Rather, it is modern, decorative and much more European; in it’s execution Friedlander is painstaking, making lovely delicate marks that are often minute in scale (The Museum offers magnifying glasses) and always perfectly harmonius.

With this kind of talent and attention to detail, Friedlander always found work especially through the patronage of her mentor Francis Meynall, but most incredibly she worked throughout the war for the Government’s black propaganda unit, producing items such as forged Wehrmacht & Nazi rubber stamps and ration books.

Apart from one blurry photo of Friedlander, we were unable to find any other images of her – what she wore, the letters she wrote or diaries she kept (there were a few Christmas cards)… all the things that make a subject come to life. This got us fantisizing that maybe she was an invented person or maybe a cover for someone, a bit like how William Boyd and David Bowie invented art legend Nat Tate back in the 80’s.

Real or not, thanks to Friedlander, I am inspired me to be more careful, neater, diligent and professional all round in my work – in fact I’m just off to tidy my studio now…

Do go and see the exhibition if you get the chance (it’s on until the end of April). Friedlander deserves to be much more widely known for the beautiful discipline, rhythm and rigour of her work as well as for her incredible tenacity as a designer in the face of terrible odds.

Thanks to Jen at Ditchling for the invite, to David for looking after the boys & Alice for telling me about Nat Tate.

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Mostly Chris prints the most amazing designs that use over 10 screens so this single colour was a doddle for him. He even spotted that the repeat is about 1mm out. Chris is our printing guru (just like his dad Podge) and he looks out for Mon and I spotting any mistakes we’re making before we’ve even made it. Naturally we adore him because he’s such a master craftsman and also because he’s so nice.

First Chris prints every other repeat, then he goes down the 50m table a second time and fills in the gaps when the first print is dry. Most days he walks over 10km!!

Here I am looking very pleased at how my little lino cut design has been transformed into a 50m length, something that would take me at least a week to do at home. I remember from when I studied politics, reading an essay by Walter Benjamin called ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ – which wasn’t very kind about processes like this which it claimed destroyed the spirit of the original by endlessly reproducing it…. reproduction does change the original but not necessarily into something less, it can also distill essential parts and help to simplify it as well.

Anyway, as a designer, it’s something very beautiful to watch when your idea becomes reality and you see it being produced and going into peoples homes. I also remember something I think Liubov Popova, the friend of the constructivist designer Vavara Rodchenko and a wonderful painter and designer herself said – how she would far prefer for an ordinary woman to buy 1m of her fabric in a department store than her painting to be hung in a famous gallery and just seen by just a few.

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There is a rational way to design a pattern – I remember Orla Kiely suggesting that you first consider the purpose of the design, then the scale and lastly the motif itself. I’ve also got lots of lovely books about the subject, which I could use but rarely do.

Instead, I kind of feel my way out of the dark: for me pattern grows out of a moment in a specific emotional time and place – I’ve often used similar inspiration and yet come up with completely different design ideas that bare little resemblance to each other.

I’ve learnt that by my personal approach is through printmaking itself: cutting and printing and recutting my printing blocks – moving them, rotating them, cutting them up untilI find a little clue of something that intrigues me and offers possible solutions… I’ve also learned from some of my favourite pattern makers like Barron and Larcher and Enid Marx to always shape my repeat unit (never square) and to overlap, reverse and flip patterns – what ever it takes to keep them dynamic and above all to keep off the train tracks. When I think I’m almost done, I look at every line and ask why it’s there – always a good way of simplifying.

Here’s some of the earlier incarnations of the Sompting design that I designed for the Virginia White Collection. This two colour design took me a while and in the end I just cut the block up and collaged the whole thing – messy. I remember coming in from the garage and showing David the final print, knowing that I’d finally cracked it – always a lovely feeling…

The strange thing is that each time, instead of knowing what to do I have to go through the whole strange and elusive process again, experimenting, developing, refining – with no shortcuts or tricks. It’s such an all consuming process that I remember what Sheila Paine says in the introduction to her book on Embroidered Textiles and quietly apologise to my boys:

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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 brown dye, I discovered many new wild woodland trees as well as unknown plants and herbs I want to experiment with.

Each plant is a product of a passing season, changing weather and local soil – and creates different conditions for dyeing. Seasonal variety and inconsistency have become an essential part of our fabric and one we hope you will love.

When there are no more walnut husks to forage, I turn my attention to tending the rhubarb plants on my allotment. The roots of these give the sweetest pink dye – I wish you could smell it!

And after rhubarb comes weld – my big discovery of last year when I noticed hundreds of plants growing under the Shoreham flyover – weld loves poor soil. When I cut and boiled up the plants, a gorgeous, rich, yellow colour filled my dye pot and the kitchen was filled with a rich and wonderful smell – I was hooked!

In Autumn I returned to collect seeds to sow for next year (weld is a biennial plant) being sure to replenish natural plant stocks and if possible create new natural dye gardens to share.

I do all my dyeing in my kitchen and because I’m using natural dyes, I can be sure they’re perfectly safe if a bit smelly sometimes.

The dye pot can happily bubble away while I cook supper and fill the kitchen with a delicious fug. I love the way I can combine cooking and dyeing – they’re actually very similar and both incredibly satisfying.

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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 why I’ve chosen only to handprint using water-based ink on 100% linen.

I’ve been a hand printer for many years, sitting on the lino during supper to get it warmed up and workable and then cutting my block in the evening when the children have gone to bed. I print wherever I can – on the kitchen floor using my feet (a good work out), in the garden if it’s sunny or in my rather cold garage if the weather’s unkind.

Over the years I’ve discovered and been inspired by other women hand printers, like Enid Marx or Peggy Angus who developed block printing into a wonderful art – full of lovely marks, movement and spontaneity.

Peggy Angus, lived not far from me along the South Downs and designed beautiful hand printed papers full of oak leaves, heraldic dogs and birds, grapes and vines, corn stalks, stylised suns and winds. They seem rooted in the natural world and in the visual arts of the British Isles. And although Peggy was very successful – designing for Sanderson and the newly built Gatwick Airport – she preferred printing by hand and would never allow her designs to be mass-produced.

Like me, she understood that the act of placing each individual block creates a rhythm and a dance within the fabric that is very special.

And the act of cutting and printing the block itself is very much a part the design process itself – never an afterthought. For me – printing is as much a part of the design process as drawing.

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