Ceri Biddle is a textile artist living and working in the Orkney Islands specialising in natural dyeing, printing and stitch. Ceri creates a variety of products all inspired by the Orkney Islands and offers workshops at her studio.

Ceri has always had a fascination with colour and print and how patterns can be spotted everywhere we look. Throughout her travels, she has been drawn to the patterns emerging through her camera as she explores new places.

She loves the colours derived from nature and has been inspired with how these natural colours can be used to create their own unique colour palette and now makes all her own natural dyes and print pastes.

She loves the use of traditional techniques such as dyeing, patchwork, quilting which she has had the opportunity to study around the world but she likes to explore it in a more modern approach.

Surrounded by everchanging landscapes, wild from the weather and soft from nature, the Orkney Islands are the most inspiring and freeing place to live and living here allows her to focus her energy on her passions of colour and pattern. Ceri's inspirations come from everything around her; the birds, the landscape, the people and the culture.

Ceri has an art studio up on the west mainland of the Orkney Islands. This allows her to follow my passion for art and teaching and run her own workshops to explore the fascinating world of natural colour and design on such an inspiring place as Orkney.

Her work explores the use of natural dyes to create colour on natural fabrics. This builds a natural colour palette which can then be printed on using hand cut lino prints taken from her own photography and drawing using naturally pigmented print pastes. She also likes to explore the use of botanical prints which uses the flowers and leaves directly to print on the fabric.

These unique fabrics are then used to create a range of products which capture the beauty and spirit of the Orkney Islands.

Ceri loves to work with her sewing machine to combine the traditional techniques of quilting with the moden approaches of machine embroidery and print.