It’s been an incredibly busy few weeks for us. There was a huge amount of preparation involved in getting ready to teach a comprehensive natural dyeing course at the V&A and thankfully I can safely say that our course ‘Natural Dyeing: A Heritage of Colour‘ couldn’t have gone better!

It was an intensive week and we were all exhausted by the end of it, some of us barely able to string a sentence together, but the consensus was that it had been a wonderful week. We received lovely feedback with one student saying it was the best course she’d ever been on! You can read all about the week’s itinerary and see more images in the journal post. If you missed this opportunity, contact the V&A Academy at courses@vam.ac.uk to register your interest – 2024 is just around the corner!

We would both like to thank our great friend and teacher, the wonderful Jenny Dean, whose book we uses as the basis for this course, for all her ongoing help and support. A big shout out also goes to Liza Mackenzie, our V&A Academy producer (and Indigo grower and dyer herself) for supporting us and helping make the course a reality.

All text and images © moderneccentrics.

We have had a very busy few months! Following on from our very successful workshop for the London Business School Student Association, we headed off to Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft to deliver a sold out Handmade Experimental Brushes and Botanical Inks workshop. This is part of a series of workshops to coincide with Shōji Hamada: A Japanese Potter in Ditchling. Ross also delivered a private contact printing workshop at the Duke of Cambridge for a textile group and we are hoping to deliver more workshops there over the next few months.

Ross will be exhibiting at ‘Warped’, the new PRISM show at Art Pavilion, Mile End Park. The exhibition runs from Thursday 20th April to Monday 1st May, and he will be delivering contact printing as part of the series of workshops, on the 24th of April.

In February, I accompanied my Mother on a visit to India to learn traditional Block Printing on a holiday of a lifetime organised by Aahilya Holidays (whom I cannot recommend highly enough). I have been back a few weeks and writing up all our adventures in detail. Working through the thousands of photos I took whilst there is taking a while! You can see and read more about them here.

January is always a grey and dreary month but it’s also a good time to think about the year ahead. Our first workshop is for the London Business School Student Association on Saturday. Jonny has taken some new portraits of Ross at work for a feature on textileartist.org that will come out towards the end of february. Ross is delivering Handmade Experimental Brushes and Botanical Inks at Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft on the 4th March. This is part of a series of workshops to coincide with Shōji Hamada: A Japanese Potter in Ditchling, which includes Keith Brymer-Jones: Boy in a China Shop: Life, Clay and Everything and Naoko Abe: ‘Cherry’ Ingram, The Englishman Who Saved Japan’s Blossoms. We are also hoping to deliver another series of workshops with The Duke of Cambridge and the Florence Trust with other exciting developments coming later in the year.

We recently ran four workshops, sponsored by the florence trust and church gate artists studios cic, at the duke of cambridge in Islington. You can read more about them here.

Please get in touch to order our titles ‘Still Life‘, documenting our show at the Leicester Contemporary, and ‘Artefact‘, looking at Ross’ ongoing Artefact series. Each title is available at £18 including uk postage and packaging, moderneccentrics@gmail.com