Playing around with homemade inks - thank goodness for the blue of the red cabbage to break all those browns up a bit!

Christmas bouquet dyeing experiments (1)

Christmas bouquet dyeing experiments (2)

Drawing and traced outline for a woodcut print

White posca pen on tracing paper to record snow patterns from bitmapped photos taken last month

A work-in-progress kind of a week… I’m stitching on top of a small collage of naturally dyed fabric scraps (see top picture) whilst hibernating in the evenings. I’ve been playing with my homemade inks to see how the colours look alongside each other (bit of a crossover with my stitching trials). I’ve catalogued the results of (non-scientific) dye experiments with Christmas bouquets of flowers donated by a neighbour once they were past their best. There was more colour in them than I expected. I’ve been carving a woodcut - my first in years - based on a sketch I did whilst taking part in the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch at the end of last month… looking forward to doing some printmaking again. Finally, I used some photos I took in the brief snow we had in Bristol on 24 January as a basis for some white posca pen drawings onto tracing paper. I’m planning to make these into a small book (what else?)