7th August – Recipe #4

The City and Guilds course was a complete eye opener for me – both from an art point of view and textiles. I had really enjoyed chemistry at school, but didn’t fancy any of the careers associated with chemistry. So went into Catering instead.

On the course we covered screen printing, batik, silk painting, all ideas to put a pattern down before then embellishing with stitch. This part I really enjoyed. Once I got over the “I can’t do art” I threw myself into the course and boy was the photocopier hot after I’d been designing!!

My favourite was batik – I really wanted to try out Batik with natural dyes, but there is an immediate problem if you want to work with anything other than indigo because of the heat and melting wax. I couldn’t find anyone at that time who seemed to be working with this in the UK so I just did my own samples with madder and indigo.

Maybe I should try again?!

Today’s recipe is a continuation of Helen Melvin’s instructions. Once the madder chips have been strained out they go back into a pan with water to soak for another 24 hours. Then the method is the same – heat to hand hot strain out the chips and then add the fibres. This time we should get peachy shades.

What do you think?