Natural Dye Screen Printing

There are still a few places left on our May workshop, Natural Dye Screen Printing, led by Nicola Cliffe, founder of Madder Cutch & Co. In the class you will learn the principles of screen printing as you turn your own drawings into a design that can be cut into a stencil and printed using Madder Cutch & Co’s unique natural dye pastes. You will experiment mixing the pastes into a colour palette of your choice to use to create a final piece of printed linen fabric, which you can take home along with the samples you have created throughout the day.

A chemistry teacher with a lifelong love of textiles, Nicola launched Madder Cutch & Co. in 2016 after graduating from UAL (University of the Arts London). Talking about her inspiration to start her business, Nicola explains: “I have always loved William Morris’s designs and his ethos and enjoyed investigating his practice further, mainly to discover his methods were not so environmentally sound. Around the same time, the chemist Henry Perkins accidentally made and hence discovered the first synthetic dyes, an extremely clever man, but here began the demise of the plant dyes as colourants. The challenge I set myself was to find a way to bring the use of plant dyes as colourants back to our interiors.”

Nicola enjoys sharing her knowledge of screen printing and natural dyeing: “The skill of screen-printing is very easy to master, but the design work and stencil making less so. What I enjoy most about teaching my workshops is the amazement on the tutees' faces when their design appears like magic on the fabric. Obviously, they have worked hard to get to this point, but at the end of the process not only do have their very own design work in print but the knowledge of how to reproduce it and more again.”

Natural Dye Screen Printing, Saturday 16 May 2020, 11am-5pm

Minerva Workshop, Unit 2, Dove Centre, 109 Bartholomew Road, London, NW5 2BJ

For more information and to book your place, visit our Workshops.