Art student once again!

The next chapter begins ...

A glorious Monday morning. Masses of house martins whizzing round the house welcoming the sunshine.  A jolly good morning sent to my lovely girls to make sure they are out of bed, my school bag packed and raring to go- and on the road to college... some very pretty meadows strewn down the central reservation of the A689 and the odd roundabout on the way to Hartlepool making for a scenic journey.

First week nerves kicked in a bit, but all in all it has been a very productive and interesting week.
There are a small number of new students joining the year twos in the textile class, six newbies from various places - 3 of us from Newcastle - all with foundation degrees but needing to resit our second year as this is a requirement for the Northern School of Art.  This isn't a problem for me as I just want to do this for as long as I can so an extra year is actually a bonus for me!

Our first week is aimed at introducing the new direct entry students into college and giving them a chance to find their bearings before being thrown in with the full class.  Day one was about introductions, a whistle stop tour, and then a dying workshop in the dye lab... great fun, very informative and has yielded some basic yet interesting cloth samples - I loved it!!!

fabric dying

The next day we used the fabric we had dyed to create some embroidery samples, we had two workshops - one on machine embroidery in the morning and in the afternoon a refresher on hand Embroidery - I say refresher but i n fact I learnt quite a lot as since rediscovering embroider a couple of years ago I have been largely self taught using the interweb and various experiments so it was good to have some actual tuition!!

fabric drying

The rest of the week saw more workshops on screen printing - including the basics of setting up the screen from scratch a process which had seemed incredibly complicated at Newcastle suddenly became easy and clearer - and some basic screen printing - still definitely not my thing - I don't quite know why but I don't really care for the process at all- I will keep revisiting it to see if my impressions and in fact my prints improve but even made simpler it still didn't work for me.  

basic embroidery samples

Finally at the end of a busy few days we were joined by the rest of our year group and we had our first induction session and were given the outline of our first brief - plus a time table which seems quite punishing after the lackadaisical affair form the previous establishment - this course looks like its going to be great fun and quite challenging - Its both scary and exciting at the same time but bring it on is my motto...watch this space!!

By the way I am still playing with the new format for the blog layout - it just that his kind of thing defeats me from time to time - comments and constructive criticism are welcome - I already know one regular doesn't care for change!!! I'm working on it 😊