Early in 2021 I was delighted to receive an invitation from TextileArtist.org to do an online workshop for their online membership stitchclub.  I happily agreed and was told I could do anything I wanted to.  I had to get a proposal together to give them an idea as to what I wanted to do and there lay the difficulty!  I am a serial experimenter and love to try all sorts of things so it was tricky to whittle it down.  In the end, I had to ask myself what is at the core of everything I do and therein lay the answer – botanical printmaking.  There are many, many ways to make prints, so I chose the simplest way I could think of with the least amount of equipment, which was easily accessible across the world.  As most of the members work in stitch on fabric, I used fabric paint/fabric printing ink as the medium and my preferred substrate – paper.  As a mixed media artist, I use collage in a lot of my work, so there was step two and then of course, nothing is complete without stitching!  A workshop was born.

There were a number of tech hurdles to overcome:  how to film it in a neighborhood of barking dogs, cars passing my studio which is quite near the road and a microphone which only wanted to wake up after 15 seconds of pushing play and a husband who kept forgetting I was filming so interrupted often!  I learned that early afternoons and late evenings are the quietest in my neck of the woods and I just had to  go with it.  And, I might add, I live in a ‘sleepy’ seaside village which is clearly noisier than I thought!

It was a huge learning curve for me but I thoroughly enjoyed it and hope that the Stitchclub members will enjoy the final product.   I’ve added a few pics of the sample I made for the proposal.