What is Red Thread Studio? It's a blog (that I hope will develop into a full-fledged Web site) focused on three areas:
- Slow Cloth: Global textile traditions and techniques, and textiles, fabric, and clothing design with a story and a history and a cultural identity; Indian embroidery, Japanese kimono, indigo dyeing, American quilts, Indonesian batik, Western wear. You get the idea; the ethnography and community of cloth. Every culture and every region of the world has a textile identity, and before we're all wearing identical, dirt-cheap Old Navy clothes, we should preserve, protect and celebrate these arts.
- New Cloth: Fabric and fashion made to be relevant to the concerns of the 21st century, especially cloth made from organic or alternative fibers, and that has a focus on sustainable design; the world of Slow Fashion; and functional "space-age fabrics," too.
- Art Cloth: The work of textile and fiber artists today, many of them using traditional methods in innovative ways. I don't worry too much about the distinction between art and craft here. I'm more interested in the idea that we're drawn to be creative, expressive, and innovative in the sometimes-painstaking medium of fiber in a world where everything can be done for us and everything can be automated, yet artists still make the choice to design and create by hand. Art quilting, knitting, felting, beading, weaving, sewing unique garments, embroidery, dyeing, printing, painting on cloth -- these acts feed the soul and beautify the world.
These categories overlap like crazy, inspiring each other, borrowing from each other, creating the world of texture, color, design and function in cloth that we may take for granted, but that's changed civilization.
Why Red Thread Studio? About twelve years ago, a friend told me that, in Japan, there is a legend that says that each of us is connected to our soul mate by an invisible red thread. I love the idea that our world is a huge spinning sphere of red thread, if we could only see it, leading each of us to our greatest passion and destiny. It's a mystical story of textiles and color and connection, and red, the color of the heart, of fire, of roses, is my favorite hue. So the red thread, the most mundane of objects, is also magical.
So thanks for stopping by; come back often; follow the red thread.
