The Retreat

The retreat was as enjoyable as usual. Even though there was a lot of rain, the fires in the living areas and the studio were cheerful and warming. Shelley's food was great and we had a wonderful sociable time.

Jacky did an excellent workshop on image transfer using Golden mediums and paints on Saturday morning. I am particularly interested in using images printed on transparencies, and hope to do a lot more with this in the future.



This is an image Jacky supplied, transferred onto calico and glued to a painted background. I rubbed too hard and lifted parts of the image from the fabric.


For this, gesso was painted onto a print fabric and the image transferred onto that. I don't think I like the distressed look so much.


And this was from a transparency that I printed years ago and never did anything with. The image transferred beautifully, despite the length of time it has been sitting. The backing fabric is some dyed silk organza I scrounged from Iris. I really like this one.

The afternoon was basically free time so some of us worked on our challenges, while others went into town where there was a presentation of quilts made by the patchwork group in Pinjarra for families affected by the bushfires earlier this year. It was a wonderful display and very moving.

After dinner we had a swap of inchies (one of the above mentioned challenges) and a hat parade. The hats were absolutely fabulous. Unfortunately, I don't have any photos. I took my camera out of my bag on Thursday to take a shot of something and forgot to put it back, so I was without a camera for the weekend. However, several other people took lots of pics, and I hope to get copies.

The hats were also a challenge. Way back in April or May, Iris and Juliet came across a pile of bowling hats for the ridiculous price of $2 each, so they bought enough for all of us and we were going to decorate them for the Melbourne Cup. Then we decided to move the challenge forward and make it a Retreat activity. I am so glad we did. It was great fun.

This morning we did some scrunch dyeing with Procion dyes. I didn't get much done - I spent most of the time mixing batches of salt and soda ash solution, but I will take some photos when I have rinsed them. We all took them home to rinse - the studio is great, but rinsing a lot of fabric would be a problem.

This afternoon was fine, and after a last walk around the garden (I swear there were more flowers out than just 2 days ago), I drove home via Pinjarra and Mandurah. I have never gone that way before, but it actually took me 10 minutes less.