October Days

Thanks to the friendly green people at Crafting a Green World for linking to my post on the presidential candidates' positions on the arts. Welcome to new visitors who found me through that link; new and old might be interested to know that I've finally written a first introductory post for Making Good, my new blog on organic, sustainable, ethical and artisan clothing and textile enterprises. This first post will be familiar ground for many of my readers here, but check back often and there'll be new news.

I see these two blogs as complementary (with some overlap) and I hope you'll enjoy them both. From my perspective I have trouble fitting all of my textile interests under this one umbrella, so we'll see if this works out better.

If recent posts have piqued your interest in African textiles, visit Ananse Village, a fair trade online marketplace for African crafts and culture. They sent me a lovely e-mail; all of their fabrics are manufactured in Africa by hand,  including batik, tie-dye, wax prints, indigo prints, mud cloth and kuba cloth, like these:

Ananse ships from within the U.S., I believe, so ordering should be easy, and they also sell beadwork, drums, coffee, masks and other handmade artisan objects. 

We're having spectacularly beautiful October days here, all the more precious since it could snow any time. This is the best month of the year here, though. It looks like this:

I hope your days are beautiful too. Back soon. 

Comments

[Anaka Narayanan]

And thank you for visiting my blog! I'm so glad I now have yours to read :)

[Anaka Narayanan]

I think many African textiles are beautiful, and I did notice that some designers at the Paris fashion week used African textile crafts (or at least prints inspired by African crafts). I wonder how sustainability fits into the fickle nature of fashion with textile crafts that require for the knowledge to be kept alive from generation to generation. For example, if there is a huge demand for African mud cloth today and craftsmen there work towards a certain level of quality and production, that's great for today. But tomorrow if the new craze is embroidery, then does the demand for mud cloth take a nose dive? How do designers or craftsmen make sure there is a constant demand for their crafts?