Forty Seasons Scarves - Jay blue

Ten years have passed since I returned to art college to start an MA and stopped making the embossed velvet scarves that I'd become known for.

That's forty seasons!! 

To mark this momentous (to me) decade, I'm developing a new scarf collection! Very different from the last London inspired scarves, these will tell a story of some of the detail in the Exmoor landscape and its colours because that's what inspires and motivates me now. 

Over the past few weeks I've been exposing images onto screens, washing and ironing down clean backing cloths on my print table, mixing and sampling dyes, and this week, after several months of thinking about them, finally printing the first scarves. 

The colours of the first (three) scarves are inspired by the amazing colours of the Jay. Remember him? Soft pink browns, deep red brown, black, warm grey with a flash of electric blue. 

Mixing dye pastes is not dissimilar to baking a cake, in that once you've worked out the exact balance and quantities of the ingredients, you should in theory get perfect results every time, providing of course you use the same oven, or in the case of these Acid dyes, the steamer. My steamer is a very Heath Robinson affair, made from a Baby Burco and a welded tube of stainless steel, nevertheless after 45 minutes, it fixes the dyes perfectly...

Every scarf will be unique and have a different pattern/colour balance to the next, these first three are in the colours of the Jay, the next, well - I've a whole landscape of colours to choose from.

The first two scarves ready to wear..!

Last panel printed on the third scarf earlier in the studio today (with the unbelievably pesky rabbit hunting rascal of a dog Luna! (x)...

Special scarves, require beautiful fabric, so these are printed onto cashmere. I've been road testing the first sample I printed a few months ago and (until this recent amazing sunny spell) worn it every day, not exactly a hardship as it's the softest scarf I've ever owned...

(p.s. lovely article about my work and our workshops on the Devon Life Magazine website here )...

Exmoor inspiration

These cushions are taking up residence in upstate New York, Lucky things!!! (and yes I do feel a bit envious!). Moorland Rabbit led the way in October last year and now Moorland Fawn and Pheasant are heading over to join him which is just perfect.
They are my nostalgic take on the 1960's - Reminiscent of reading Enid Blyton, riding in Morris Travellers and drinking lashings of Tizer! I screen-print every one (front and back) and so they are all unique. I've become really fond of them all, but especially in these colours.

In much the same vein I've been revisiting favourite Moorland plant drawings and capturing the essence of them in loose inky plant drawings. Here I've overlaid them onto a monochrome version of the tartan backgrounds from the cushion prints - it's just the starting point for a new scarf collection (but which I expect to be in full moorland colour!).

Heather...

Gorse...

Marram Grass...

Excited because our first Photoshop workshop starts tomorrow.

...from my seasonal colour sample notebook.