COURSE DESCRIPTION
Come to explore how a floor plan of your house or favourite rooms could provide you with interesting ways to create a contemporary take on kantha in which some simple outlines of household objects, furniture, people, animals and decorative border patterns can be included.
Kantha is a Bangladeshi word for cloth, and a particular way of making embroidered quilts by from layering and stitching together the good parts of old worn-out saris. Household objects, people, and animals outlined in running stitch feature in frames or decorative borders in many traditional kantha. I will bring some historical and contemporary examples for you to see.
We will begin by folding layers of cloth together and making a plan to trace the onto the top layer. Don’t worry, true scale and representation will not be important! Then we will begin to stitch to add colour, life and pattern to your kantha using variations of running stitch
DOROTHY TUCKER
Dorothy Tucker works from her home in North Norfolk. She is a member of the Textile Study Group, exhibits her own work, and tutor’s textile workshops in the UK and abroad. Born in India, Dorothy’s choice to stitch by hand is informed by her research into Kantha, a form of embroidered Quilt traditionally made in what used to be Bengal. In January /February 2020 she travelled in search of kantha to West Bengal and Odisha on a group trip arranged by Discover India through Textiles.