A week of mark making and a little bit of dyeing. I’ve been experimenting with using some new Chinese brushes - quick sketches in the veg patch and also a drawing of a tree peony leaf. I also tried a new approach for monoprinting… painting black oil paint onto a piece of paper and then drawing on the back of the sheet as a transfer. Much quicker than inking up a perspex sheet, and I like the marks of the brushstrokes that are transferred to the printed drawing. I made some prints into a concertina book, but it’s just a prototype as the paper was a little thin and cockled when glued together.

My latest dye experiment was with a large Cordyline flower from the garden, which I chopped up as soon as it had finished flowering. I had high hopes as a lot of colour was immediately extracted when I covered it with boiling water, but the end results are a little bit underwhelming… some nice buttery colours on protein fibres, but on the cotton and linen there was very little colour at all. It does however win the coveted title of stinkiest dye bath so far… definitely one for boiling outside, and a heady whiff of men’s urinals drifted across the gardens of Coombe Dingle when this was on the hob!