This week has been London Craft Week (13th-19th May) and every year it seems to pass me by, so this year I decided to do an event every day! I wanted to do all workshops but I had college on Wednesday so I decided to see an exhibition in the evening instead. I also had a workshop booked for this weekend – tassel making at West Dean College – but it was sadly cancelled due to insufficient bookings. I was very disappointed but having just completed five days worth of crafting I’m quite glad of the rest this weekend!
I started off the week with ceramic transfers at Morley College. I’ve done ceramics before but never used transfers to apply designs to pieces that are already glazed and fired. We used bone china blanks and there were lots of different pieces to choose from: plates, bowls, vases or mugs. I decided to do a large plate as I wanted something I would use once it was finished. The transfer process was easy to do, but you had to make sure you squeezed out all the air and water from under the transfer paper, otherwise your design would just float away! The final part of the process is for it to be fired again, but the pre-fired plate is a good example of how it will look when it’s done.
Day two was gold work at Hand and Lock. I have of course been to Hand and Lock before and I have a bit of experience with gold work, but I still learned some new things and its always nice to go to their studios and be amongst all the beautiful work and the embroidery enthusiasts! We did a small design based on the crown cipher that they produced for King Charles III’s coronation.
On Wednesday I visited ‘A Textile Assembly’, a fantastic exhibition hosted by Craft Show at their Staffordshire Street gallery in Peckham. The gallery itself is a lovely space with great lighting. The work in the exhibition was amazing! It’s so great to see exhibitions of textile work and I found it so inspiring to see it all assembled together. There were lots of techniques on display and the whole exhibition was well curated.
Thursday was tin embossing at the Natural History Museum with artist and designer Meg Fatharly. This was a new technique for me and it was amazing to be doing it surrounded by the inspiring collections of the museum. The workshop took place in the marine invertebrates room, although the theme of the class was botanicals. One of the experts who works at the museum came down to talk to us about the botanical collection and showed us some of the specimens they have in their archives. The embossing itself was surprisingly easy as the tin is very soft and malleable. The embossing tools came in various sizes and changing the pressure achieved different results in the mark making.
Last but certainly not least was Friday’s workshop, brush making with artisan Rosa Harradine which took place at the William Morris Society in Hammersmith. Again, this was another craft I have never tried before and I found it to be very gratifying and much quicker than I was expecting! There was a very generous amount of materials available for us to use and everybody in the class made five to six brushes each through the course of the day. The process was a lot more physical than I expected too. It involved using your whole body to keep the tension in the binding thread to ensure your brush didn’t fall apart at the end.
It’s been a really inspirational week learning new things and meeting so many lovely people at every event I attended. I’m already looking forward to next year!