Rip it. Burn it. Scorch it. Boil it. Bleach it. Melt it. Put it in a compost pile.

That's what students in Richard Elliott's fiber workshop — Breaking the Rules: Fabric Alterations, Manipulations and Transformations — will be doing with fabrics Aug. 5-7.

The experimental workshop will be a laboratory playground for fiber artists, a chance to break all the rules. They will try bleaching, bonding, laminating, piercing, slashing, burning, boiling, melting, shrinking, shaping, rusting, composting and foiling in an attempt to transform the surface and/or structure of natural and synthetic fabrics.

Inspired by contemporary Japanese and American textiles and a dialogue with the materials, students will brainstorm their own extraordinary hybrids. The resulting materials may then inspire fashions, costumes, interior furnishings, sculptural or conceptual applications.

Elliott is a Bay Area fiber artist and adjunct professor in the textile department at the California College of Arts in Oakland.

His mixed-media and image transfer works on paper have been exhibited widely and have appeared in Artweek and Fiberarts magazines.

Slides and examples of Elliott's work will be shown and participants will leave the workshop with a collection of mutated, hybridized textiles for further experimentation.