Tag: summer school

Summer School 2025

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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.

Alice Fox
Mandy Pattullo

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.

Sue Green, hand stitch
Sue Green, print and hand stitch

Summer School 2024

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Summer School 2024
Each July we run a Summer School led by a rotating trio of tutors from our membership.
This year our Summer School theme was ‘Travelling Lines’ with tutors Jane McKeating  , Polly Pollock   and Janet Edmonds .
We’ve gathered together some reflections from our tutors on this year’s event.

Janet tells us:

“I was pleased to be able to stand in for Dorothy at short notice. The students were all very accommodating and understood that life happens and changes have to be made.

I planned a course that fitted as well as possible with Dot’s requirements list.

We made zig zag books and filled them with a range of different marks bearing in mind the overarching theme of ‘Travelling Lines’: Lines of communication between people, railway lines, phone lines, Ley lines; lots to choose from.  Many students chose pathways through countryside and referenced their own neighbourhoods. 

We used a variety of tools to draw lines that extended across the paper. Students made their own brushes and tried drawing with spaghetti in addition to the more usual pens and crayons. Small areas were selected through a view finder to interpret into stitch.

There was a good atmosphere amongst all participants and everyone intermingled with other groups during breaks and at meal times too.”

Polly explains:

“It was exciting, but also a venture into the uncertainty of teaching a basketry course to students who usually enrol on textile courses. The group I worked with were so open to exploring something new, learning fresh skills and working with unfamiliar materials. We spent the first two days working in a fairly structured way, while thinking and talking about how each student felt they wanted to take this forwards.

It was so interesting and inspiring to see how each person brought something of themselves and their interests to what they chose to work on over the remaining two days in a way in which was most relevant for them.    

Not everyone completed what they started during the summer school, but since going home these students completed their work and sent me photos, which is so rewarding that they were enthusiastic enough about what they’d started to go home and finish it. Several students have emailed to say what they want to do next, and sent photos of what they went home and made after the course.”

Jane’s thoughts:

“My group of 16 were looking at how we narrated journeys through drawing and textiles. All came prepared with an idea of a journey they wanted to explore, and these ranged from exciting international trips, inspiring walks down their own gardens, and personal family journeys. We explored these through both observation and imagination, using collage, simple print and hand stitch and each of the participants created a series of small works – supported by myself and the group to explore their own ideas.

We had a wonderful mix of first-time participants and two members who had been attending Summer School for 34 and 38 years. We also had several international members. This mix gave the group a really special quality, so great discussions and support was felt by all of us. The room was busy with activity from early in the morning till late at night and the range and quality of work produced was very creative and innovative. Everyone arrived a very personal solution to capturing their journey while contributing to a great group dynamic.”

Thank you to our three tutors and all our enthusiastic students.

Details and booking for our 2025 summer school will soon be available on our website.

Summer School 2024

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Summer School 2024

Hillscourt Hotel, Rose Hill, Rednal, Birmingham, B45 8RS
Monday 15 – Thursday 18 July 2024

Each July we run a Summer School led by a rotating trio of tutors from our membership.

This year our Summer School theme is ‘Travelling Lines’ with tutors Jane McKeating , Polly Pollock and Dorothy Tucker.

There are still a few places available on Polly’s exciting course: Shape, Form, Basket. Polly has been making and teaching basketry for many years. Her long basketry journey began with an interest in textiles, her work having gone through many transitions. For the past 15 years Polly has worked increasingly with paper, exploring more personal themes, most recently in her work ‘Kitchen Drawer: Emergency Home Repairs” for the TSG Making:50 exhibition. 

Polly Pollock. Making:50 stitched and woven structures.

Shape, form, basket:

Lines joined up form shapes. Shape and lines intersecting in space create form. Form becomes basket.

After considering the qualities of lines through drawing and mark-making, you will explore how materials can represent these. Baskets are created by linear materials interweaving. You will experiment with materials, colour, scale, density, surface, stitch… Your work might be materials/technique led, or informed by a more personal theme, like tracing the steps of a familiar walk.

Basketry is a slow and meditative craft, allowing time for contemplation and experimentation; it is rooted in ancient traditions, with enormous potential for experimentation and innovation. You may focus on a single piece, or a small collection of exploratory samples to develop further in your own time.

Further details and booking via our website: https://textilestudygroup.co.uk/courses/summer-school-2024/

Composition- Big, Bold & Brave with Ruth Issett

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Composition- Big, Bold & Brave with Ruth Issett

Summer School 2022

Starting from simple black and white cut paper compositions, students worked through many possibilities. They then selected two contrasting paper colours and developed their ideas further, exploring a number of different challenges. They were asked to work quickly and to enlarge their ideas so that their work climbed the wall or covered their workspace. By sharing and being open minded students quickly produced a wide variety of possibilities that could then be adapted to simple bold textile pieces.

Using large pieces of pre coloured fabric supplied by the tutor, everyone developed their paper ideas further using layers of fabric, applique, cutting and manipulations as well as additional stitch. Despite the extreme heat the group worked happily together sharing and encouraging each other to develop new ways of working and becoming braver and bolder and sometimes bigger!

Ruth Issett

The residential Summer Schools are tutored by different Textile Study Group members each year, and are open to everyone. This year the Textile Study Group Summer School was led by Ruth Issett, Jan Miller and Mary Sleigh. The tutors worked with design, composition and ideas as fundamental parts of their courses, encouraging and supporting the students during their inspirational courses. Below are examples of students work.