Teaching Teachers

I recently had the wonderful opportunity to share some mixed media/textile techniques with a group of teachers in Swindon. With a given theme of People and Places, looking at methods of making puppets and postcards seemed appropriate, and getting colour to travel from place to place by transfer techniques. However, we had only two hours in which to do this, so it had to be a whistle stop tour.



I developed a template for glove puppets, which we could use to transfer individual designs made by painting and collage (my examples of which are pictured above), which then had scope for further embellishment. We also briefly touched on photo transfer using a Lazertran product which is printed by a computer ink jet printer, and considered the construction methods and materials to use for functional textile postcards. In the time we had, finished products were not possible,but some fabulous pieces of artwork were produced which would not need much more effort or time to transform into puppets and postcards. I sincerely hope I will see some finished results of what was started that day, and that the lovely ladies who came will have fun using them with their pupils.



The picture above shows beautiful artwork by Helen Flinders and Sarah Woodhead, shown here with their gracious permission. The photos do not do full justice to their work, unfortunately - too much of a rush at the end. My goodness, they were all such good students - and after a hard day in the classroom, too.