I belong to the South West Textiles Group who have an exhibition stand at the NEC in Birmingham, March 20th to 23rd. We have a set format – 12″ square thick canvases in a limited colour palette to the theme of Anglo Saxon or Medieval. So I have used some of my stash of fabrics created using rusted farm implements found on a friend’s French property. I added partial images of medieval keys. Fun to do though the machine is not wild about rusted fabrics – I should have got out one of my old machines.

Here they are, in case you are not going to the NEC:

I enjoyed doing something different for a change.

Last weekend, Karen and I had 3 days of messing around in my studio.  The objective was to trial a number of natural dyes.  I have 3 favourites – walnut, potassium permagnate and logwood. Here are my walnut trials.

The photo below is plain walnut on silkco (silk cotton mix approx 50/50).  I have deliberately left some white paper at the edges so the depth of colour is apparent.

We also stick wrapped pieces of silkco and put that into the dye bath.

We added some cotton and linen fabrics to the dye bath – the colours are much lighter, almost pretty beiges.

In a steamer, we added bundles of wrapped walnut husks and got a very textured sample of an “eco print”.  Again left edges of white paper to show the depth of colour.

We also did a number of other trials which I will blog later – here is a photo of the stash.