Textile treats

My applique bird

I have been very fortunate to be able to attend two fantastic Textile workshops this week. Both organised by Creative Futures at Weave maker space. This is a fab resource just 5 mins up the road from where I live, but this week is the first time I've had opportunity to use it.

On wednesday evening I attended a workshop on silk paper making and bondable fibres. This was run by artist Wendy Ann Sranger. We experimented with making paper from a range of silk fibres and embedding different objects between them. The process was quite quick but it did take a while to dry. In fact my thicker piece took until Saturday morning to be completely dry.

Working with wet silk fibres

Angelina fibres, net and silk fibres

We also worked with angelina fibres - which i have used before. the process is quite simple. you just layer the fibres and other items and press with an iron, making sure the fibres are between non stick baking paper so they don't stick to the iron.


On Saturday I attended a full day workshop with textile artist Mandy Pattulo. I had seen some of mandy's work at local exhibitions and was intriqued by her processes. She gave a talk about how she approaches her work and what is important to her. Throughout her career as an artist she's been interested in tyhe use of quilts and the area of the UK we live in has a rich quilt history.

These are both examples of Mandy's work. 

She shared with us some of her work, you can see some more examples here.

We then learn about one of the techniques Mandy uses and used it to make out own applique on a piece of vintage quilt. We used a finger turned applique method. I was quite surprised how quickly I could do this. Our designs were then embellished with embroidery. I could certainly see myself using some of these techniques. especially when we do our school community quilt later in the academic year.

My applique bird

I'm looking forward to the next couple of workshops in about three weeks time.