Samples of homemade ink (some more successful than others)

Pattern play with a rubber stamp carved from an ink drawing of periwinkle leaves

Quick ink sketches of rare splashes of colour in the garden at the moment

Red cabbage dye experiments - purple fades to lovely blues and teals

A grey and dreary week here in the UK, but I’ve busied myself making new batches of colour – both for dyeing fabric, thread and yarn, and making ink. I’ve had a few false starts with the ink making – pans boiling dry, or the colour being too weak or crystallising, but I finally seem to be getting the hang of it. Fun to see them all together on a sample sheet… what felt like a lot of non-descript browns have more subtlety than I realised at first glance. I enjoyed making a pattern stamp based on one of my daily ink silhouette drawings, and I’d like to develop this further and start to print onto some of my dyed fabric. It’s been great having the garden as a focus for my artwork to create a welcome distraction from all the depressing headlines at the moment, and of course to make the most of staying at home.