BLOOMSBURY FLOWERS – Bath Textile Summer School 2025
- A two-day workshop with Caroline Zoob creating images inspired by Bloomsbury flowers using paint and stitch. For more information and to book a place on the waiting list, please visit the Bath Summer Textile School HERE.
- The workshops are held in the Bath Literary and Scientific Institution, on leafy Queen Square.
Additional Information
The painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant both painted flowers. The garden at Charleston Farmhouse was a painters’ garden. When my husband and I took on the tenancy of Monk’s House, the former home of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, we were instructed to garden ‘in the spirit of Bloomsbury’. In planting the garden over the ten years of our tenancy, I was mindful of the palettes of flower paintings of both Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, as well as the artwork decorating many of the surfaces and furniture at Charleston.
Inspired by the paintings of Vanessa Bell, you will work with paint and stitch to create your own images of flowers, whether traditional or stylised, in the ‘spirit of Bloomsbury’. You do not need to have any painting or embroidery skills, but some confidence in one or the other would, naturally, enhance what you derive from the course. If you have never painted before though, you will be amazed at what you achieve on linen: in fact, I sometimes find it hard to get people to put down their brushes and pick up a needle. The paint flows off your brush, into the fibres, and magic happens…
It is expected that only the first morning of the workshop will use paint, and after that we will be exploring ways in which too add stitch, using exciting new decorative stitches to create stylised flowers and decorative details. To book please visit www.bathtextilesummerschool.co.uk: if it is sold out, there may be a waiting list. If this workshop is sold out, you may want to consider Inspired by Fraktur as there is a certain amount of crossover between the two.
I provide all the materials, paint and thread, in return for a small materials charge payable at the course.
