Reflecting on the Summer School of 2025

Every year, our Summer School provides a residential retreat where makers can immerse themselves in their craft. Surrounded by a supportive community and guided by leading textile artists, it’s an environment filled with fresh inspiration, creative breakthroughs, and genuine artistic growth.

As we look back on our most recent event, our tutors share their reflections and celebrate the incredible work, energy, and achievements of everyone who joined us.

Tutored by Textile Study Group members Alice Fox, Sue Green, and Mandy Pattullo, our three workshops used Materiality as a springboard for the creative process. It was a wonderful opportunity for attendees to play with materials—gathering, exploring the touch and feel of old fabrics, and experimenting with ideas of deconstruction and reconstruction. Here is a look back at the three incredible workshops:

Alice Fox: Here and Now 

The details that surround us can be fascinating if we just allow ourselves to take them in. Alice’s course aimed to open our eyes to the world around us, finding potential in ordinary things. Led by the location and the materials available, students were encouraged to take an experimental approach. With a focus on objects and marks collected during short walks from the studio, attendees explored different techniques, made use of found items, and developed visual ideas on both paper and cloth. It was a fantastic chance to explore alternative approaches to mapping, resulting in beautiful, personal records of place.

Sue Green: Unmaking-Remaking 

Sue explored the concept of "unmaking," using cloth to tell new narratives. Students engaged with experimental print and stitch processes, responding to traces of memory. Each participant selected an item of cloth or clothing with a personal connection, deconstructing it to reveal the hidden stories within before using the fragments to print from. The resulting outcomes were wonderfully varied, facilitated through individual discussions, and brought together as a unique series of samples.

Mandy Pattullo: Textile Collage

Mandy led a gentle hand-stitching course that encouraged students to dive into their personal stashes of old fabrics, lace, and garments. The unique character of these fabrics—often flawed through wear and tear—was transformed through textile collage techniques, creating a new beauty from separate parts. Students deconstructed, layered, and rearranged their materials to create patchworked surfaces, which they then embellished and enhanced with stitch. It was inspiring to watch students develop their personal stitch languages and invent new ways to "draw" with stitch onto fabric, with some focusing on traditional pattern-making and others drawing from the stitch conventions of different cultures.