Painting is not my forte, my mum was a brilliant artist which is not always a help! I’ve got two textile workshops on the go at the moment, both of which required paint! This was my cutting out table earlier today!

This week on TextileArtist.org there’s a free week long workshop with Gwen Hadley, I really enjoyed the mini free workshops they held last year so I decided to have a go. They have all sorts of different textile artists doing workshops in their stitch club, I’d love to be in Stitch Club but I know at the moment I haven’t the time to commit to the stitching, maybe one day…in the meantime I’m enjoying their occasional freebie.

The first video was released yesterday, it’s all about making a mark, we had to choose three colours and collect various fabrics and mark making tools beforehand. I chose denim blue, gold and grey, I’m hoping if it turns out OK I can incorporate it into another project I want to do this year. This was my collection of textiles;

We had to use acrylic paints and make four samples using two of the colours, two were to be heavily painted, the other two lighter. I have a basic set of acryllic paints which I bought for fabric printing and never used. I mixed the blue first and then used a mixture of brushes, sponges, sticks etc to make random marks…I never have been keen on random! The blue wasn’t too bad, but then I tried to mix the gold colour, my first attempt came out too orange, that’s the one on the far right of the photo. I tried again adding a little viridian green to the cadmium yellow, much better…but not a lot of paint left! They are now going to be cut up and rearranged…hopefully they will look better then otherwise I’ll be covering it all up with other fabrics and stitching!

My second attempt at using paint on textiles is for something completely different…

For quite a while now I’ve admired the work of Nicki Franklyn of The Stitchery, she does gorgeous embroideries of gardens, trees etc, very pretty. She has just started a series of workshops on line called Stitch a Garden in which she’s covering embroidering trees, flowers, garden buildings and stuff like watering cans. The idea is that you can stitch a picture either of your own garden or one you like, she’s doing the garden at Hilltop (Beatrix Potter’s garden) as an example.

I’ve decided rather than a picture (I’m running out of wall space!) I’m going to stitch a book, with embroideries of the three different areas of my garden and hopefully lots of mini embroideries of some of the features.

The first couple of videos have been about getting inspiration from different places, making a basic design and transferring that onto fabric. I’m still mulling round in my head how to do the designs, I think I’ll wait to see how it pans out before I start anything. However, this week she also explained how she colours fabric with watercolour paints, gave us tips about mixing colours and suggested we coloured some fabric ready to use on our designs. I think she uses them for things like trees, appliquing them in place. I’ve made one piece of fabric with greens, blues and browns, all merging into one another so I can pick the bit that works!

This looks much more like my cup of tea!! I’m looking forward to the next stage.