...and I'd like to thank

well, lots of people!

By now it's late September and I began screenprinting in June. The banners are stitched and completed. I've resolved the poles for hanging. Bamboo was £5, metal posts from a forge were £200.  We used long copper tubing to hang all three together for the photographs and bamboo for the exhibtion.
Thank you again, Heather for helping me at Oxford Printmakers, especially with the technical aspects of photographic screen printing.

Thanks, Dave for providing a shoulder to cry on, and turning a blind eye to the bales of silk that came through the front door and the vats of tea simmering on the cooker to dye the silk.

Time to do the photography. The weather is getting windy and unpredictable and we still needed to find a good setting. This involved walking around the village fields looking for outdoor sites - which Islay the Westie thought was great fun. In the end, outdoor photos were impossible weather-wise; but may still happen this summer.

We drove to a number of churches to see if it was viable to do indoor and outdoor shots and in the end we liked the beautiful little church in West Hendred:  Holy Trinity, and hoped to do both.
The Rev'd Elizabeth Birch kindly allowed us to use the church to take our photos.

Tessa wisely suggested asking a local professional photographer and Richard Evans did a grand job. www.juliaevansphotography.com

Thanks Dave and Tessa for helping me hoist the banners to photograph them. We did a trial run the previous evening so that we wouldn't waste Richard's time. On The Day it was windy and there was nowhere dry to put the banners and they could have got sodden and covered in moss in two seconds flat, so outdoor photos could not be considered.. Dave came over with me before work to help hoist the banners. Remember, this is a listed building so ropes over beams seemed to be the only solution. He threw a tennis ball with a rope wrapped around it over the beams to make a pulley - this took skills I certainly don't possess!
Everything gets complicated with large sizes, delicate fabric, keeping it clean (church floors, wet grass), not getting it creased, finding uncluttered backgrounds, etc. Nigel suggested that the banners should be hoisted high and the backdrop could be the beams with upward shots. The coloured ones worked fantastically. The white ones looked a bit insipid and really need an outdoor photograph.
I've added this post to thank people but also to show how things are never as easy as they seem and that often in a project like this every step along the way is a mission, even when you think the project is complete!

And last but not least, the hanging committee at all three exhibition venues - this is the kind of submission that is headache-making. Thanks Glister's Team!

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