Dye like an Artist

Laura's book on hand dyeing fabric with Procion MX

What? A new book? Well yeah, kind of! I’ve been writing this for months now wondering how best to share it with you. Get it published like our book The Painted Quilt? Yes, that would be lovely. As an author it really is quite thrilling to hold a proper book in your hand, one with your name on and filled with professional photos of all your work. The downside? Well sticking to a word count, set number of pages, not being able to include the odd video clip. That’s just the hurdles as a creator. Let’s not even think about the impact of making that book, printing it, storing it, shipping copies all over the world.

But maybe I should self-publish and print? We’ve done that lots before. It was exciting, daunting, financially incredibly risky. And still the problems remain, the boxes and boxes of paper, the storage and the shipping.

Much as I love holding a book in my hand as an author and as a reader, perhaps the balance for printed versus digital has tipped, ever so slightly.

So let’s try something new.

I’m going to publish this book to you here. Starting today in a series of articles. Think of it like a part work. I’m not sure how many parts, the beauty of digital is that I can keep adding to it, I’m never going to run out of pages. I can even go back and update the parts if I come across new, better ideas.

I’ll illustrate the text with lots of photos and hopefully the odd video clip if that seems helpful. For those of you who want a full video step-by-step course that’s coming too (later in 2024). It’ll be an accompaniment to what I post here. Both independent of each other, you can read this, take the video course, do both, whatever works for you. Think of the book here and the course over on our website as sisters, but not twins.

So what next?

Does that sound like your cup of tea? Hope so. I’ll be starting posting the book here this week starting with an introduction, just as in a good old-fashioned book. After that, the next chapters will follow as and when they are ready. I’m not setting myself deadlines on this, I want to do it properly, make sure the writing is good and that the examples are thorough and well photographed. To access it all you’ll need to be a paid subscriber and you can opt in for that at the bottom of this post.

And the video course?

The video course will be separate to the book and paid for separately. You can take the course independently of reading the book and vice versa. As with all our courses you’ll find them over on our website. Please note the book is coming quicker than the course! The course lessons are not yet published, but I will update you when they are ready for enrolment. I anticipate that it will be early summer 2024, but if I can get it done before then I will.

Ready for the first book instalment?

I’ll tag all the book posts with ‘Dye like an Artist’ so you can find them. When you’re subscribed you’ll get them sent to your inbox too. As a paid subscriber you’ll also get access to all archived posts so if you miss one, or want to go back and read a previous section of the book it’ll all still be there (look on the Archive page, main menu).

I’m excited for this and I hope you are too. Thank you for reading so far.

Laura x