The Newcastle Vintage Fashion Fair

During the last few months Jayne Turner and myself have been organising a Vintage Fashion and Textile Fair for 13th November at the Royal Station Hotel in Newcastle We are pleased to announce that we have now sold all the tables to vintage dealers from as far away as Liverpool and Perthshire who will be selling quality vintage items such as clothing, bags, jewellery, textile bits and pieces such as lace, buttons, haberdashery. Some of them have put links on our Facebook page www.facebook.com/the.newcastle.vintage.fashion.fair eg. Dotty for Vintage who sell vintage clothing in sizes 14 - 26, hurray for all curvy women! It is the first big event that we have organised so please come and support us by not only coming to it but doing lots of your Christmas shopping at it, even if you are buying Christmas treats for yourself. There is a £2.50 entry charge, £2 concessions.

Autumn Textures

The leaves are starting to look really pretty. If you want to capture the glorious colours of Autumn then you could think about booking on to my surface decoration course on 5th and 6th November at Horsley Printmakers. This is a mixed media course and there are a few places left. For more details look at http://www.horsleyprintmakers.co.uk/courses.htm. The courses I am running in the Spring are also advertised on the printmakers site. I am particularly excited about the 4 day intensive Easter workshop on the Oriental theme.

Time to plant tulips

Its getting to be time to plant tulips. I love looking through the Sarah Raven catalogue and ordering a few special ones each year. Just cut this off the drawing board. I did it really quickly over lunchtime during the last surface decoration course I taught. I just used up all the scraps in the style of the great Eric Carle ( he of The Very Hungry Caterpillar).

Pearly

I haven't had time to do much of my own work over the last week or two as I have been busy preparing samples for an 'Enchanted Forest" workshop I have taught today and will be repeating in Rothbury next week. So because I haven't anything to show this week I will just have to show off my daughter's work instead! Here is one of her latest designs and check out her alphabet of superstitions which she has been putting on her blog daily for the last 2 or 3 weeks http://alice-pattullo.blogspot.com

Manchester Textiles Fair

Yesterday Jayne and I had a wonderful time at the Manchester Vintage Textiles event. I was looking for old quilts and found some real lovelies, all Irish. This is an old one from County Antrim - I love the way the stripes are not quite straight and give it a liveliness that perfection would just not achieve.

This is a really unusual Crazy quilt which is made in blocks. Very stained but some lovely old prints.

A beautiful silks and satins log cabin top. Obviously hasn't seen the sunlight but some of the silks are barely there and mice had nibbled the edges.

The backs are as good as the fronts....

If you are jealous of my purchases soon you will be able to buy your own as Jayne and I have organised vintage textiles to come to Newcastle. There will be vintage clothes but lots of other rare, old textiles which you can only get through the specialist textile dealers we have hunted down. Put the date in your diaries NOW November 13th and tell all your friends. We want as many people as possible to come so we can run these regularly!

Footbinding

Have been thinking of a shoe themed course for the Spring. Here is some work I did a while ago on foot binding. I think I did the drawings from the lotus shoe drawer at the fantastic Oriental Museum in Durham

The Textile Hub

Not only is Waitrose coming to Jesmond but so is The Textile Hub! The Textile Hub will offer courses by professional textile artists in the heart of Jesmond at a venue above the wonderful 1901 cafe next to Jesmond Library. Jane Fraser, Fiona Rutherford and Ali Rhind have organised an exciting programme of courses which will start to run in November. Check out the web site www.thetextilehub.co.uk for details of what's coming and links to the artists' web sites if you do not know their work. I hope to be running a course there in the Spring