That felt great!

A very big thank you to Judy, Lis, Mandy and Sharon for being the first students back in the studio after a 6 month plus gap and for being the first students on my Colour Your Palette workshop. We had a great five days. It was so good to share my studio with like minded company who’s surname isn’t Higgins! (Not that I don’t love my Higgins boys ….). There was lots of chat, lots of laughter and most importantly, lots and lots of colour!

The workshop is a deep dive into understanding and using colour when working with dyes although large elements of it are equally applicable to other media. I’m a great believer that we learnt best by ‘doing’ and that’s what we did. We mixed and scrapped hundreds of swatches as we explored the impact of the hue bias in each of our co-primary colours and as we looked at the complex colours you get when you start mixing complimentary colours. We explored different colour schemes and considered how our colour choices are determined by our artist styles and our preferred techniques for applying colour to cloth. And we worked through colour studies based on different sources of colour inspiration. Lis and Sharon even found time to print some fabric as well. There are a couple of tweaks needed to my timings and demonstrations but I’m pretty happy with how the five days went and am looking forward to teaching Colour Your Palette again in July and October.

In fact I’m looking forward to all of my workshops scheduled for this spring and summer. My next workshop is Breakdown Your Palette on 17th to 21st May, assuming we ease restrictions on hotels and travel on the 17th as expected. I have one place left on this workshop and am going to start an hour later than normal at 10.30am so that students can travel to me in the morning. I also have a few places left on Breakdown workshops later in the summer. Breakdown is my favourite thing and my favourite workshop so if you fancy joining me please click here.

I also want to thank those of you who tuned into my first live workshop yesterday as part of The Creative Craft Shows Craftfulness Festival. I was a nervous wreck leading up to it - mostly worrying that the technology wouldn’t work but, in the end, everything went well. It did however take half a bottle of red wine and a tub of Ben and Jerries to peal me off the ceiling afterwards!!!

Needless to say that I’m planning a quiet few days ………