A full-day textile printing workshop with the ladies from my Thursday embroidery club, led by Lena Larsson, whom we discovered through her exhibition at Husby Gård back in October. Several of us visited the exhibition, enjoyed it, ended up talking to the artist herself, and at some point someone proposed that she could show us how she does stuff. Half a year later, here we are!

This was an incredibly fun way to spend a day. Just playing around with paint on fabric, in all kinds ways. I haven’t been so immediately, playfully creative since I mucked around with children’s crafts back when Ingrid and Adrian were in their first years of school.

Doing this together made it so much better than it would have been on my own. Lena showed us examples of her work and gave us some ideas to get started with. Then someone came up with a variation, and someone else thought of a different one, and a third person combined the two into something entirely new. The ideas just kept flowing.

Textile printing sounds like it might require all sorts of equipment, but it really didn’t. Textile paint, paper plates to put it on, some cheap paint rollers – that’s all you need. And then random stuff we found lying around: pieces of string, rolls of masking tape, scraps of old lace, strips of paper. Potatoes, for cheap stamp-making, if you want.

For fabric, we used old bedsheets that we ripped into smaller pieces, and thrifted towels. With cheap and plentiful fabric, we could play freely, without any concern for the cost of the materials, or any worry about running out. We all ended up with piles of experiments stacked on the floor under our work stations, with layers of newspapers in between to keep the paint from spreading.

I came home with tons of pieces of printed fabric, each one based on a different technique or idea. They just barely fit on my dining table to dry, and it took an hour to iron them all to set the paint.

Tomorrow we will have the second half of the workshop, where we’ll be embroidering on our newly printed fabrics.