New Goodies!

I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time this week as one of my favourite textile designers Jane Lindsey was hosting giveaways on her Snapdragon Facebook page. Jane gave up her job as an art gallery curator, retrained in horticulture, moved to a smallholding in Stirlingshire where she set up a flower growing business and creating embroidered textiles. Jane regularly posts about her life on her blog Snapdragon's garden where you can also find some good advice about running small businesses as well as links to buying her work.

Anyway as I said I just happened to be at my computer when Jane was giving away this lovely 'Strawberry Jam' notebook cover (usually her jam notebook covers feature 'Raspberry Jam'). My fingers could not type quick enough as I had seen her lovely notebook covers in local galleries and I was lucky enough to be the first commenter. I also manged to snap up the wool behind it so that I can put my own sewing skills to the test.

The next day Jane was giving away more goodies and I managed to win this lovely corsage which I think I shall give to my daughter as she is the fashion expert in our house and I felt a bit greedy keeping everything myself:

Also in the post this week came these lovely cards which I purchased from another favourite textile designer Melissa Wastney of Tiny Happy. There are more of these cards to buy in Melissa's etsy shop. It is four years since Melissa from New Zealand started her Tiny Happy blog and business and to celebrate she is having a really great giveaway on her blog.

Inkling Prints

I am always interested in searching out new textile designers, especially those who print their own work, and checking out what they are up to. This package arrived from Kiran who has recently set up Inking Prints which is based in the UK. Kiran's textiles are very fresh and exciting and her work has been flying out of her Etsy shop.

Unfortunately Kiran has had to take a break at the moment from her printing, but hopefully everything will be up and running again soon. I was lucky enough to have bought this lovely bag before she decided to take her break and of course I had to buy one in my favourite colour:

'Florentine Lilies'

I was down at Birmingham Printmakers this weekend which was really good as I have not managed to do any printing recently. I have been printing a new card called 'Florentine Lilies' based on a drawing of some lilies in a painting. I was really pleased with how this turned out on Saturday as the first time that I exposed this screen a few weeks ago the lines were much too faint and therefore I could not use the screen to print. After redrawing the lilies and making the image darker I was then able to expose it properly as you see above and print the image.

Textile printing

This week I received a little notebook that I bought from a lovely Japanese textile designer - Hitomi Kimura. Her shop can be found here and her blog is kalla Textile Design. I have followed her blog for a while now and love her textile designs and am amazed how Hitomi manages to print all these in her small apartment.

I am really enjoying my screen printing for textiles course that I have been taking and below is my first design based on pomegranates printed in three colours. The pink seems a little bit too bright, however, someone said it looked like a Mary Quant design which is a sort of compliment as we are supposed to be taking our inspiration from the 1950's /1960's!

I might try printing it in different colours and on a more natural colour background.

'Snowdrop' Cards

Yesterday I had a very successful days printing at Birmingham Printmakers . I had already designed a new card called 'Snowdrops' and wanted to screen print this using two colours. I was really excited when I mixed this lovely green colour and even more excited when I saw the first print layer:

I then mixed up the colour for the top layer and was really pleased with the results:

Screenprinting for textiles - Week 2

Week 2 and Steffan started us off with some drawing exercises using vegetables and fruits. What was interesting was that he told us to think in sections by placing coloured squares behind the fruits. I started off using this pomegranate above as inspiration; which had been 'printed' onto the square behind it. I was also fascinated by the table itself which had wonderful marks on it that had been left behind from printmaking!

Screenprinting for Textiles course

This week saw the start of a new adventure for me - a course in Screenprinting for Textiles which is being held at the Regional Print Centre in Wrexham. Fabric printing is something I have been dipping in and out of, having been inspired by the many wonderful individual fabric printers out in the world (more on this in another post). This is a chance for me and others on the course to learn how to research processes and techniques, produce and develop designs and then produce fabric lengths all of which I am really excited about. I will be posting about my progress and other interesting resources over the next few months. The course is run by the Welsh artist and printmaker Steffan Jones-Hughes who runs the Print Centre.

The first evening we were really lucky to have a talk by Alun Evans who collects printed textiles form the 1940's - 1970's. He gave a presentation and also brought along some of his fabulous textile collection. It was exciting to see so many vibrant textiles, sadly from an era when the British textile industry was in full flow.

The above fabric is by one of my favorite designers from this period Lucienne Day and is called Petal. Among the stunning designs that Alun showed us was this one called Treasure Chest:

This next one called Cascade was designed by Evelyn Redgrave for Heals in the 1970's:

Patio by Sonia Dunthorne:

Another one from Alun's stunning fabric collection: