The textiles course at Capellagården is an intense two week course led by the lovely and inspiring course leader Lisa. Prior to the course we were asked to find some fabrics that we were particularly inspired by or were attracted to. These were pinned up on the wall and presented. It was a simple but very effective little ice breaker to get to know your classmates' tastes.
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| The beautiful 1950s textile rooms |
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| A row of screens drying outside the textile studios |
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| My collection; you could tell I was a sucker for detail! |
The very very very long fabric table
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| Even the washing up is co-ordinated at Capellagården! |
Day one also involved stamp printing with potatoes exactly the same activity you used to do at school. It was so much fun! Some students in the other classes did scoff at the thought of a kindergarten activity as our first lesson, but it proved to be a great way to kickstart our brains into thinking about patterns, distances, geometric shapes and colours. A humble but valuable start to the course I think!
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| Erika limbering up. |
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| The brief was to form a geometric pattern from the potato print method. |
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| Here are a few of mine - bit oriental looking! |
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| The strips are sample fabrics to experiment on. |
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I found that printing in black enabled me to 'read' the pattern better.
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| Here's a close up of my final pattern on linen. If I did a course on upholstery then maybe this might be the seat fabric! |
When we filled the walls with all of our potato prints the results were astonishing. There was such a variety. Who could have thought the humble potato could produce such wonderful patterns?
