Advanced Workshop

The hands-on fabric and textile-printing workshop — the making course of the programme, where a designer learns materials by working with them and turns a design into printed cloth. It begins with an introduction to fabric itself, the fibres and weaves and the properties that let a designer read a cloth, and the real work fabric does in a room, softening light, giving privacy, absorbing sound, adding warmth and colour and defining space, so that fabric is understood as a working material and never as mere decoration. It teaches textile design through the motif and the repeat, tracing textile design across cultures from primitive art to contemporary work, applying the elements and principles of design to cloth, analysing a motif and building the repeat that is the basic unit of a printed textile, with the honesty that a good repeat is engineered so its join is invisible rather than a motif merely copied in a grid. It moves into hand block printing, the carving of the wooden block, the outline and fill blocks that register together, the natural and pigment dyes and their honest trade-offs, and the living, geographically protected Indian traditions of Sanganeri, Bagru, Ajrakh and Kalamkari, insisting that hand block printing is a highly skilled living craft whose slight irregularity is its authenticity and value and never primitive or obsolete. It teaches screen printing as a different technique with its own aesthetic, the mesh screen prepared by stencil or photo-emulsion, the squeegee stroke that lays flat even colour, and the registration of one screen per colour, making clear that screen printing is not simply a cheaper or better block printing but a different tool for different work, and that digital printing has not made either pointless. And it ends in a live-scale fabric project, a design for furniture, a wall hanging or a wall covering developed from concept through motif and repeat to a chosen print method and a sample and finally a full-scale piece made in workshop with an external craftsperson, coordinating the fabric with wood, metal and stone in multi-material composition, and respecting the professional duty to specify fabric that is safe and durable for its use. Throughout, the course treats craft with respect rather than nostalgia, and teaches the designer to make, to judge a cloth honestly, and to choose the right method, dye and fabric for the work.