Where do your textile designs come from? How do you breathe life into a project and find the magic sustaining it from idea to a finished textile piece?

Staying in flow as ideas grow, allowing for happy accidents and change to occur keeps a project from going stale. Learn how to shape your ideas without stunting them. Learn how to let your ideas grow and flow.

Artist and maker Helen Hallows leads this mixed media workshop to help you develop your ideas from paper onto cloth and stitch. Building layers of controlled and gestural marks with paint, stencilling and print onto cloth, Helen will guide you to produce developmental pieces that bridge the gap from initial ideas and concepts towards ideas for final interpretations and finished pieces. Building on the ethos of her previous course ‘Find and Draw’ Helen will encourage you to play, experiment and explore without self-judgement, discovering the fresh and innovative in your work along the way.

Over the two days, guided by Helen, you will learn to create in series, working on multiple pieces to alleviate work from becoming overloaded. You will look for the spaces that can illuminate and showcase your textile abilities. You will develop composition, space, mark and shape to create unique backdrops to add stitch to. Keeping the energy form the sketchbook course, you will make marks and new beginnings in stitch. For this workshop that will be hand embroidery and mark making with stitch.

The course is designed to get you to engage with ‘What if’ and to go back to the beginning to refresh your working methods and enliven your practice. The ethos of the course will be based on process, not end points and you will finish the workshop with new ideas and new ways of working with cloth, paint and stitch. You’ll return home with a basket of new starting points that you can develop in your own time.

This course will build upon a workshop that Helen is running earlier in the week ‘Find & Stitch’ that unlocks new ways of making lose and free marks that lend themselves to working with bold shape and mark and developing new ways if working boldly and gesturally.

Art materials

There will be a £5 material fee for this workshop. This will provide you with fabric backgrounds and  access to paints and brushes and printing materials.