Introducing Summer School 2026

By Textile Study Group, 30 September 2025

The 2026 Summer School will use ‘Animate’ as the springboard for the creative process. You'll explore captivating figurative and floral symbolism, create vibrant collages, and delve into the fascinating realms of design and composition. Immerse yourself in these dynamic explorations that will enrich your textile practice, providing gentle encouragement and support along the way.

Your experienced and inspirational tutors will guide and support you in developing your ideas and creating a fun and exciting experience

Floral Figures, with Vivienne Beaumont

Explore the exciting fusion of figurative art and floral symbolism in textiles! If you're looking to add a figurative dimension to your textile art, this workshop is for you.

We'll combine drawing, print, collage and stitch, mostly using the sewing machine. You'll playfully explore faces, proportions, and composition, drawing inspiration from both historical and contemporary art, with a particular look at medieval millefleur tapestries. This workshop aims to provide you with fresh approaches to tell your stories in textile art. Although the emphasis is on using a sewing machine (experience is preferable) hand stitch is an option.

Vivienne creates figurative textile art, using machine embroidery and print to explore personal and universal narratives, often through mythological themes. She is a member of the TSG, Prism, and The Society of Designer Craftsmen, and her work has been showcased in a variety of exhibitions, including the Knitting and Stitching Shows.

More about Vivienne

Come Dance With Me, with Siân Martin

You will explore intriguing dynamic methods in this workshop such as with a zoetrope and flick books to inspire you to enrich your textile practice on how to convey simple movement ideas.

We shall be considering rhythm and changing pattern, and the workshop will provide plenty of ideas for translation onto cloth using drawn and hand-stitched marks.

Eadweard Muybridge and M C Escher have and continue to inspire my own creative thinking in several personal textile projects and design stages and will give us inspiration for this course. We will study these past masters to learn and understand from their methods to expand our own personal ideas, offering further insights.

You will develop lines and shapes that suggest movement and animation; and have fun immersing yourself in these explorations to enrich your textile practice, so ‘come dance with me’.

Siân Martin exhibits regularly with the 62 Group of Textile Artists as well as the Textile Study Group. For many years she was an online tutor with Distant Stitch and now tutors Stitch Textile Artists and offers individual online mentoring.

More about Siân

Sumptuous Articulated Colour, with Ruth Issett

This course will be packed with colour, using paint, collage, fabric compositions and even stitch! A vibrant inspirational floral still life will be the starting point, plus detailed colour observations & colour mixing. By selecting and recording differing colour palettes, students will investigate and make a number of personal colour collections. Transparent, translucent and opaque surface qualities of both paper and fabric will be investigated to give light and depth.

From this research, students will use their paper and fabric collections selectively to build compositions working with different aspects of the still life. These compositions could explore a variety of different interpretations, both in paper or fabric and could be further embellished with stitch. A lively course, giving students a chance to explore colourful ideas with a variety of methods and materials.

For many years printing and dyeing was central to Ruth’s practice, as well as colour and stitch. She taught a number of accredited courses, wrote several books as well as delivering courses throughout Europe, USA and Australia. She is now happy to limit her travelling and spend time in her Suffolk studio focusing on the use of colour, through fabric and paper compositions.

More about Ruth