Inspiration: the Difficult Fabric Challenge

I’ve just spent the last four days teaching the C&G Summer School with Ruth Higham.  The weather was glorious, which helped as we spent Thursday at the Botantic Gardens in Glasgow.  There was so much inspiration in the plants, especially some of the amazing foliage and the glasshouse architecture.  The next three days were in the Studio making a piece of art cloth using dyeing and printing using a thermofax screen which the students designed as a result of the Botantics visit. 

I also gave the students a fun challenge.  When I visited AQS Quilt Week in Paducah I spent several hours trawling the vendors’ booths for a particularly difficult piece of fabric to work with.  When I saw this piece, I knew I had struck gold.  

Each student got a piece and was challenged to turn it into something beautiful.  Someone did suggest burning it and I think that could have worked, if you then stuck the ashes to some nice cloth in an interesting pattern, but no-one took me up on this!

Here are some of the results (there were another three but I didn't get to photograph them):

Laura dyed her piece and it will look great in some quilt soon

Moira dyed hers and then appliquéd it to a red and purple background.  I love the colours she achieved

Valerie’s  is in progress and is chopped into pieces of confetti, along with other fabrics, layered between dissolvable fabric

Rosemary has hidden her piece in the middle of this faux chenille design

Irene also slashed hers and then stitched it down

Christine dyed then stitched her piece onto a black background with tiny seed beads

Ellen cut circles from the fabric and turned them into a group of Suffolk Puffs to decorate her apron

Finally, Linda decided to celebrate the fabric and created this little appliqué.

I’m really impressed with their inventiveness – what do you think?