Design inspiration and a little bit of simple dyeing
Juliet Bawden in her blog creative salvage describes how she found inspiration in Austrian Folk Art. To cheer herself up she dyed a bathmat with Dylon machine dye
Do you ever wonder how designers go about thinking up new designs? Well most often they use visual references from different sources. I have just found an example of this process from when I was appearing on the television makeover programme called ‘Change That’; a road show that was to artefacts what ‘Changing Rooms was to room makeovers.
At the time, I was on holiday in Austria and I loved the traditional folk art that adorned much of the furniture where I was staying. I took photo’s of the motifs, and then enlarged those I wished to use, and then traced over them using grid paper.The image was then photocopied and enlarged. I used the largest image for the project and painted it the size I wanted. I turned over the traced image to get the bird facing the other way and painted a second bird. They were used facing one another rather than, as in the original, facing outwards. They were then decoupaged onto a piece of furniture.
The bad weather is getting me down and so to cheer myself up I dyed a tired looking off white bathmat using bright sunflower yellow machine dye from Dylon. It looks so great I took a photo of it. 
Juliet has authored craft books for over 20 years. To browse them on Amazon, please click here.
