BalconyLife Cloth

Started last year during our ‘BalconyLife‘ exhibition outdoor display and ‘Open September at the Dye Garden’, this is the first time that the BalconyLife Cloth is being shown to the public. It is a visual record of the community engagement and interaction with the work we have been doing at the Nomadic Dye Garden and…

Final Week Part 2 – The Weekend

By Saturday our luck had really changed re the weather, though 4 weeks of wonderful warm sunshine in September was an amazing run. Rainy sleety awfulness had set in and the idea of creating solar jars in a blizzard somehow didn’t seem promising. A rolling fire later and we were ready for visitors! Once again…

Final Week Part 1 – Equinox Harvest

Well we did it… Our ‘Open September’ has come to an end, and what a grand success. Coming out of lockdown and with a very limited growing season, we managed with a lot of kindness and help to open ‘BALCONYLIFE A Collection and Nomadic Dye Garden’ to the public. With the final week approaching, unsurprisingly we had…

Fourth Week – Experimental Brushes and an Indigo Taster

Week 4 of our ‘Open September’, and the garden is thriving – the madder is loving its new more spacious container and the weld finally looks like its alive and willing to take part in this project! The woad is doing well in the troughs and fortunately whatever was picnicking on it has moved on….

Third Week – White Linen, Indigo and a Birthday

Week three and we have been dyeing in the garden, even if it was just reviving an old indigo vat, which due to circumstance has lain idle this year. The impromptu garden set up with Cat worked a treat. It’s always a little daunting when planning a ‘play date’ as you never know what your…

Second Week – Open Studio and Garden

Our first full week (well Thursday to Sunday) of being open to the public has been a great success, with a stream of neighbours and inquisitive locals plus friends and colleagues from further afield coming to visit us. It has been quite a challenge to get the studio organised so that visitors can safely enter…

Opening Weekend and Journey Retraced

The first three days of our Open September went excellently, with the weather holding and lots of local visitors from the neighbourhood dropping by. One gentleman who remembers the Florence Trust moving in in ’88 said how nice it was to be welcomed into the church grounds after the gate being locked for so long….

BalconyLife – A Collection and Nomadic Dye Garden Open!

This bank holiday weekend, we are opening ‘BalconyLife – A Collection and Nomadic Dye Garden’ to the public at the Florence Trust, St Saviours Studios. Over the course of September the Garden will be open for visitors to look at the wide variety of dye plants and sculptures that had their start on our small…

Journey Revisited

In working out the schedule of events to coincide with the opening of ‘Balcony Life: A Nomadic Dye Garden’, we decided to revisit ‘Journey’ as one of the first exhibits in the garden. We laid out the fabric to access what remained after two years in storage, and the fact that a third of the…

Balcony Life – A Nomadic Dye Garden

This summer we have been creating and installing a nomadic natural dye garden in St Saviours grounds. These photos document the creation of the garden, from the initial clearing and building of a wheelchair friendly walkway and socially distanced treestump seating (built by the wonderful Steve Allbutt) to where we are at the moment. The…