Create your own cloth

Have you ever walked through a vibrant but chaotic bazaar in Morocco, Jaipur or Luxor, patiently shredded the juicy, tangy orange skins of Seville oranges as you make marmalade or strolled along a beach in winter and marvelled at nature's monochromatic palette?

And have you then wondered - how can I capture that moment in fabric and thread ?

From the vibrant ....

to the subtle - we're surrounded by the most amazing colour palettes; a feast for the eyes and senses.

There's no great mystery to creating wonderful, luscious cloth and you don't need to be a chemist or rocket scientist either to get fantastic results. If you can learn the function – or role – of the different ingredients to make sense of the process, develop an intuitive and enquiring approach you will gain the confidence to seek the colours and textures you want.

Fantastic looking cloth may take several processes to achieve the desired outcome, but the more you play and experiment, the more you engage in the process to see what happens, the more you will learn. Each Create your own cloth course is a different process, but they are all linked by colour; you can start at the beginning and work your way through or dip in and out.

Create your own cloth:

Click on each image to read more about the courses:

- play days: one-day introductions

- in a bucket

- with a screen

- with paper lamination

- with surface design

- with indigo

- breakdown your palette

- using resists

- out of this earth

- using nature's colours

Do you have to do anything with your cloth? Not if you don’t want to. For some, working with cloth – wet or dry – is both the journey and the destination. The pleasure and satisfaction of simply creating is enough. For others, using the cloth is important… and one of the joys of cloth as a creative medium is its flexibility. Quilts, clothing, embroidery, stitched textiles, home furnishings, accessories, sculpture, dolls, art cloth and even jewellery are potential end uses for your endeavours.

So, whichever course you do: be curious, be bold, be fearless, be adventurous, cut loose and push things to the limit of ‘what if…’.

This is your cloth,
This is your journey,
This is your creative way.

And above all:
Relax, breathe and enjoy it!