In a Masterclass with Standfast & Barracks, Craft&Making Club members at Blackburn Museum & Art Gallery visited a printed textile design studio to learn how to create repeating patterns through a collaborative creative project.
The day began with an introduction from the Standfast & Barracks team, who shared insights into the company’s renowned heritage in textile printing and their own diverse career paths to the industry.
Following the introduction, they described the process of making prints and repeating them to create fabrics of different lengths. Club members were then divided into pairs to rotate through three different workstations, spending 15 minutes at each one to experiment with various designs.
The first station focused on collage making, offering multi-coloured, pre-cut shapes and paper for members to experiment with different combinations of shapes, angles and colours. The second station featured Indian woodblock printing, with multiple wood blocks showing different patterns and shapes for the Club members to paint and print in various colours. The final station involved mark making, where they used different kinds of paints, stencils and stamps to create freeform designs on paper.
After visiting each station, Club members were tasked with using their favourite new printing skills to create two pieces that the Standfast & Barracks team could take back to their factory for fabric printing.
Once the two pieces were selected, they introduced the idea of a group design. A long roll of paper was stretched on one of the tables, and everyone, including Club tutors, contributed to the creation of a vibrant, multi-coloured pattern using paints, pastels, collage, drawing and printing.