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.

Every season these change with the weather, climate, soil…so it’s always an exciting workshop – totally immersive and full of surprises.

On the first day we mordant our fabric – students are encouraged to bring along different weights of fabric to experiment with. And then we take a long walk to forage for plants, fruits & leaves, barks.

We always forage sustainably and come back in time for a nice veggie lunch!

In the afternoon it’s all about getting witchy and brewing up our plants, we make up to 40 dye pots and  just before we leave for the day we add our fabric, leaving it to steep in the hot dye bath overnight.

This is SLOOOOW textiles after all … in the morning we check on our fabrics and how the colour has developed overnight. There are lots of revelations, maybe some disappointments but also some wonderful surprises.

We record our findings using recipe sheets so that everyone has a dye book to take away. And we experiment with different mordants and after baths. Students choose the colours they love and maybe dye a bigger piece of fabric to take away with them.

I’m really keen that students experience how generous plants can be and how one plant, like rhubarb root can give so many shades. I love the fact that students leave this workshop feeling confident enough to experiment with the plants, fruits & flowers where they live.

Building your own special relationship with your own natural habitat – wherever you live, brings so much respect for the natural world and it’s abundance. I hope this is something every student takes away with them

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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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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 isolated times.

Sharing time together has been really special and gaining an understanding of their practice and their particular approach to pattern making has been an ongoing source of inspiration to me.

I thought it might be nice to share a few tips from some of things we have learned together.

Firstly, it seems to me that good pattern is all about creating a sense of movement AND balance. This is something the exercises we do together really help to explore. Together we go through a series of sequences that explore repeat print making and all the endless possibilities of the block. This sequence is something I hope students will take away with them and use to expand and develop their pattern making practice.

Space is your friend. Good design is all about learning how to harness negative as well as postive space. Again – in my workshop we spend time exploring the different properies of negative and positive space and how to create the best balance.

As well as exploring the pattern making  I’ve also been helping students to get better results transferring their marks onto fabric.

When printing blocks onto fabric there is a lot to consider including the block, the printing medium, printing bed, fabric and how to best apply the ink – getting all these ingredients right can help you get a great print or not as I have learned from my many mistakes over the years. It’s important to me that I give my students as much technincal help as possible so they can get the print results they deserve.

I really hope to be back teaching physical workshops in my Sussex studio soon but in the meantime if you would like to take your pattern making skills onto the next stage do get in touch by emailing  sarahburnspatterns@gmail.com

Happy patternmaking!

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My friend and collaborator on the Steyning Imprint,  Alice keeps a flock of sheep. To me they always seemed like rather strange creatures to be interested in – wonderful as lambs (and very tasty) but rather stupid looking as they got older. But this was before I learned to love wool.

Every summer Alice pays the shearer to shear her sheep to avoid the dreaded ‘fly-strike’ (basically the poor sheep are eaten alive by maggots) and faces with the perennial dilemma of what to do with the wool. One summer we had a huge felting party with the kids and other times Alice uses the wool to wrap around fruit trees, stuff in her attic as insulator – she even used one fleece to fill a cushion…

In all the small villages and hamlets around us in West Sussex there are the clues to this one great English Industry – Cottages with names like Spinners, Woolgatherers, Weavers… My old Vicar is called Graham Woolgar (Wolgatherer). His ancestors are in the graveyard and on the walls of Steyning Town Football Club. But very little of this once great industry remains.

Ofcourse there are still a few craft spinners and fab places like Weald and Downland, Louise Spong at South Down Yarns, Debbie at Plawhatch keeping these valuable skills alive. But the real problem is there is there doesn’t seem to be much market for the local small scale wool being produced around us.

Infact small holders farmers we know are burning their wool because there is nothing else they can do with it. A natural, almost free product with great properties – water proof, hyperalleregnic, carbon neutral, compostable is literally going up in smoke because we no longer have small scale production chains to make the best use of this wonderful local resource.

Inspired by the likes of people like Louise Spong, by Alices’ husbandry and  all round ingenuity – last summer we decided to do something about it; stopping using plastic in our cushion pads (that’s what polyester is) and replacing it with wool instead.

We did not know what a labour of love this would be but as well as being a great deal of work it’s also helped me totally fall in love with wool and become alive to it’s many qualities.

To begin with we put the word out that we would be happy to take any unwanted fleeces and Alice’s shed soon filled up…

Processing the masses of the ‘waste’ wool our small valley had to offer from the flocks of people like Ronnie and the Vics at Annington Farm meant that first we had to find somewhere to store it all (sorry Daniel). Then we began by cutting out the worst bits of gunk (you can imagine ) then soaking the wool in a succession of scalding baths to remove the lanolin (the natural product made by sheep to keep them waterproffed – such amazing stuff).

After many of these we use a final bath of lavender water to scent the wool. We then fill pillow cases with the damp wool and leave them on the gentle heat. Then the business of teasing out the wool begins – it’s rather lovely to find crushed between your fingers on a dark winters evening – a summers hay grass…

Most of the the fleeces we were donated were Jacob’s sheep as Ben granny was a spinner and loved Jacob’s for their long staple (the length of the wool fibres). These Jacob’s have gradually made their way down the valley (they are great fence jumpers) and even Alice has a few now.

Somewhere during all these hours working with wool – pulling, tearing, stroking, teasing – I have fallen in love with what is the most amazing natural creation: soft, strong, pliable and resiliant. It makes me feel really happy to think we’ve saved even a small amount of this amazing natural resource and put it to good use.

So if you’re in need our cushion pad or two – do have a look at our cushion pads. They’re available in our standard sizes – 45cm x 45cm and 35cm x 50cm but we’re also really happy to sew up any size cushion you like. We think they’re really reasonably priced and offer a fantastic alternative to plastic polyester pads.

They’re all hand-sewn (by us!) using 100% organic calico.

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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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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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I have so many happy memories of cycling through this sleepy Sussex village on hot summers day (it never rains on the London to Brighton Bike Ride) – the immense wall of the Downs and Ditchling Beacon looming up before us on our bikes but every year always managing somehow to get to the top with all the bystanders cheering us on and the exhilaration when we got to the top, sunburnt and sweaty.

Then I started coming back to the small museum when I became interested in printing and natural dyeing as the museum had a wonderful letterpress as well as the archive of the pioneering 1930’s weaver Ethel Mairet, who championed natural dying through her seminal work – ‘A Book on Vegetable Dyes’. I even blogged about her on my old unsewn blogspot site back in 2010 http://unsewn.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/map-of-patterns-gunta-stozl-and-ethel.html

In those days – the museum was a very different place: set up by two elderly sisters Joanna and Hilary Bourne, who had grown up with the children of many of the artists now in the Museums collection – they collected a varied and inspiring collection of artists work, most especially the work of sculptor, wood engraver, type-designer and letter cutter Eric Gill and the calligrapher Edward Johnstone.

It all felt a bit ramshackle – the kind of place that was run by passionate amateurs: clever gentlefolk with fascinating stories to tell while they served you tea and homemade cake, there were always garden flowers in jam jars on the tables… It’s now quite a smart place with lots of dark wood but the wonderful paintings, carvings and weavings are still there and so are the lovely volunteers. The Museum also boasts a fantastic shop full of beautiful things, including my Dora Fabrics washbags, tea-towels and aprons. It’s great to see them there – my attempt to follow Ethel Mairet’s  exhortation to make great colour – naturally.

Here are some wise words from her ‘A Book on Vegetable Dyeing’:

‘Dyeing has almost ceased to exist as a traditional art in this 20th century and the importance of colour on our lives seems to be realised less and less. It has been forgotten that strong and beautiful colour, such as used to abound in everyday things, is an essential to the full joy of life…We fear bright colour because most of our traditional colours are bad and they are bad because the tradition of dyeing has been broken. If any craft worker wants sound colour he must make it for himself….It may be objected that life is not long enough but the handicrafts are out to create more life, not out to produce quality nor to save time…’

I am only too aware of this as I write this blog I have 3 dye pots boiling away on the stove but no meal to feed the children as supper time looms closer…

Joanna and Hilary’s had a great dictum which also chimes with me – “the most important things to learn in order to survive are how to grow things, how to make things and how to cook.”

The exhibition at Two Temple Place in London –  Modernism in Retreat shows how artists like Gill, Johnson and Mairet were looking for solitude and sanctuary in rural Sussex but I felt that it doesn’t tell the other half of the story nearly so well: how they used their seclusion to shape a powerful and radical influence on modern day England – branding the tube network with his distinctive lettering for Frank Pick in the case of Johnson and Gill carving Prospero for the new BBC building on Portland Place (a scandal because he wore no underwear under his smock as he stood on the scaffolding chiselling away.) Mairet herself encouraged other important women designers like the block printers Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher and the weaver Elizabeth Peacock as well as establishing a successful workshop and business herself which attracted international designers like the Bauhaus weaver like Gunta Stotzl (they wove South Downs wool and cellophane together).

The Museum of Arts and Crafts at Ditchling have also got a show on at the moment celebrating Ethel Mairet’s wonderful recipes for natural colour. Me along with many other dyers have had a go some of her recipes with some very different results… I experimented with the bark of the alder tree and discovered a lovely grey. Do go and have a look at the exhibition if you get a chance.

I’m running some more of my own Wild Textile workshops this May, where we will be foraging for seasonal plants and flowers near my home in the South Downs, not far from Ditchling and making our own wild colour.

If you’re interested in nature, colour and fabric and most of all like playing and experimenting – this is the workshop for you. You’ll get to learn how to create your own wild colour sourcebook as well as a final piece combing your favourite colours and techniques to take away. The workshop costs £80 for 2 days with all materials included and you will learn how to make your own natural dyes using foraged plants, make mud resist patterns with indigo and experiment with a larger piece to take home with you.

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