"Into the Wildwood" part 1

Last week I spent two days on a course with Stephanie Redfern at The Bramblepatch entitled "Into the Wildwood". I have always enjoyed seeing Stephanie's work, recently at the Easter exhibition, and jumped at the opportunity to expand my skills in a different direction.
Planning for the course I looked at imagery that I thought I could work with. I really like Silver Birch trees,  graceful, willowy and the bark is so papery and interesting, so I collected images. I then thought about the mushrooms that grow with the birch trees and found that the common one is Fly Agaric, the pixie-esque red and white one!

Armed with these images I then tried to think about HOW I might use them in a composition to work on for two days. Knowing that "design" is not my strong point, I tentatively sketched out some ideas.

As you can see, my drawing has not improved!
After a introduction to her work Stephanie demonstrated some of the techniques she uses and then it off on our own to create!
I used most of day one to paint and print fabrics and papers that I might want to use in my composition. I was delighted to realise that one could use blown vinyl "anaglypta" (sp?) as a printing block and the one I had access to gave me a really good birch bark pattern!

I also tried this using a brown and yellow dye over printing on white cloth to achieve a similar result.
Eventually I had to actually try to create something rather than just playing with paint!