Summer School 2025

Summer School 2025

The theme for our 2025 Summer School is Materiality.

This is a residential summer school tutored by Textile Study Group members and open to everyone with workshops led by Textile Study Group members Alice Fox, Sue Green and Mandy Pattullo

Summer school is held each July at Hillscourt Hotel, Rose Hill, Rednal, Birmingham B45 8RS.
Monday 14 – Thursday 17 July 2025.

The three workshops will use materiality as the springboard for the creative process. It will be an opportunity to play with materials gathered, explore the touch and feel of old fabrics and experiment with deconstruction and reconstruction ideas.

Your experienced and inspirational tutors will guide and support you in developing your ideas and creating a fun and exciting experience. Choose from the following three workshops:

Here and Now with Alice Fox: The detail that surrounds us can be fascinating, if we just allow ourselves to take it in. This course aims to open our eyes to what is around us, finding the potential in the ordinary. Led by the place and the material available, an experimental approach is encouraged. With a focus on objects and marks collected on short walks from the studio we will explore different techniques, making use of what we find and exploring ways of developing visual ideas on paper and cloth. This will be a chance to explore some alternative approaches to mapping, developing individual personal records of place.

Unmaking-Remaking with Sue Green: This course will explore the concept of ‘unmaking’ using cloth to retell new narratives. Experimental print and stitch processes will be explored responding to traces and memory.

Students should bring along an item of cloth or clothing with a personal connection but not something precious as it will be taken apart to reveal the hidden stories within and used to print from.

Outcomes will be facilitated through individual discussion and will form a series of samples to further develop independently.

Textile Collage with Mandy Pattullo: This gentle hand stitching course encourages you to bring together your own stash of old fabrics, lace and garments, that may be flawed through wear and tear, and transform them through textile collage techniques to find in them a new beauty.

Together we will deconstruct, layer and rearrange materials to create patchworked surfaces, which will be enhanced with stitch. You will develop a personal stitch language which might be based on pattern making with traditional stitches, refer to stitch conventions of other cultures or invent new ways to draw with stitch on to fabric.

Full details are all available on our website and bookings open on 14th October.