Four fabulous metal embossed Japanese stab bound sketchbooks were made on my workshop in the studio yesterday. We started off creating a practice piece of metal embossing to get used to the tools and materials and how best to use them. Three students designed their own motifs and one decided to go with one of…
This year there are an amazing ten workshops to choose from! I have workshops on Christmas card making, Christmas tree decoration making and Christmas gift making – for those people who are hard to buy for! You’ll find details of all of the different workshops over on my Christmas workshops page, and you can book…
Over the summer in my community craft group at The Lodge in Blackhill and Consett Park, we have been making raffia baskets. Here are a few of the baskets, both in progress and finished. I love how they have all turned out – amazing work, everyone! The trickiest part of raffia basket weaving is getting…
What a great three weeks I’ve had lino printing with the community art group at The Lodge at Blackhill and Consett park! We have been working with one of my rose sketches, and from this, created reduction lino prints, gradient prints, two colour lino prints using using one block and masking, as well as plain…
A lovely bunch of crepe paper roses was created by my students at my weekly community art and craft class. These roses were all made out of professional florist quality crepe paper, which meant that they were easy to mould, and kept their shape. I love that each student put their own interpretation on their…
Tearing and cutting and gluing pieces of paper is so therapeutic, and my students certainly found this to be so in yesterday’s Collaged Landscapes workshops. I just love the variety of styles and themes that everyone chose, and the wonderful way in which they executed their ideas. Wonderful work, everyone! If you would like to…
Not just screen printed bags, although that was the main focus of this workshop! We also painted and added a few lino printed motifs to our bags too. Lots of fun was had, with plenty of ‘ooohs’ and ‘ahhhhs’ as screens were lifted off and textile paints blended together in unexpected, yet attractive ways. Sun…
We had a lot of fun in our community art and craft group this week, tearing and cutting and sticking paper in order to create these vase of flowers greetings cards. I love how everyone took my initial idea and then interpreted it in their own way to create their cards. A fun and relaxing…
In this week’s workshop I showed everyone how to take a blank, balsa wood box, and turn it in to a faux marquetry decorated box. I call it ‘faux’ marquetry, as the method is very different to traditional marquetry techniques, but I still think it produces a lovely effect. It was definitely a relaxing and…
A look at all the wonderful ‘junk journals’ my class participants made in my workshop this week. No need for expensive art materials, these journals were all made from ‘junk’ found around the house – paper, cardboard, old magazines and wrapping paper, odds and ends of string and scraps of fabric. Journalling is a wonderful…
I’m showing off the work of another one of my ‘students’ today! There’s a bit of a story behind this one! I have been having a weekly Spanish / English language exchange chat with a lovely madrileño, Carlos, for the past 18 months. We’ve got to know each other well over that time, and he…
This week in my community art workshop we created a star shaped desk calendar, and I thought I would show you the beautiful calendar that Emma created. The decorated pages of the calendar were created with a monoprinting method. I showed everyone a few different techniques and everyone got stuck in and had fun playing!…
