Red Thread Studio

A Gift from India

I'm working on those new posts, as promised . . . I'm sure my productivity will improve when I can stop biting my nails and watching the campaign news. Meanwhile, yesterday was my birthday, and my friend Betsy the Artist gave me a spectacular gift -- though we agreed that we should co-own this textile, as her mother bought it on the street in India and it just seems like something that should be shared. Betsy doesn't have a spot for it in her current home, so I am the lucky recipient of it for now. And so I share it with you. There are endless interesting details in this large embroidered patchwork piece, so I'll take more pictures for later. And it has hundreds of magical shisha mirrors, so I feel both protected and inspired by this joyful piece.  Click on any photo to enlarge. 

Moonlight Becomes You

Today is the Full Moon -- the Hunter's Moon or Blood Moon. There's a chill in the air and it's getting dark early, and I don't feel ready for winter at all, especially with the slightly ominous tone of violence coming from Sarah Palin rallies and livid right-wingers who think they're entitled to win every time by any means necessary, and meanwhile too many people in real need, wondering how they'll heat their homes or buy school supplies for their kids. 

And yet. Onward we go. The moon is magical and maybe we can right our collective ship and see some mass re-prioritizing.

I'm always so talky on this blog that you must wonder if I ever actually create anything; well, there has been some stitching going on. These photos suggest that I need a new camera, or more attention to focusing - sorry. I finished the 10-year-UFO  scrap quilt:

I practiced the shisha stitch so I can work on my OM piece, using big sequin pailettes -- tragically, the sequins get scratched from the needle, but the scratches show up more in this photo than in real life:

I made a new lunch bag for my dear friend Aidan, who goes to all-day school now. This excellent pattern is available from Spool; I added an outside pocket with a Velcro closure, and a handle. 

And finally I started another bead embroidery piece, though I think my iron may have melted some of the silver thread:

That's all for now. Stay warm and safe and make a wish/set an intention on the moon.

Visual Feasting at Canadian Tapestry and Linnet

Arg . . . I just wrote a long post and accidentally deleted it. Starting over. This is NOT something you want to do with the new and not improved Typepad interface, as writing just one post might drive you insane, let alone two.

Since I seem to have Canada on the brain, I can't say enough about the phenomenal Canadian Tapestry site by the Textile Museum of Canada.  (I've linked to the Flash version of the site.) Start anywhere -- it will take you on a veritable mind-map of textiles and culture in every part of the world and in every textile technique. 

My search for more information on shisha mirror embroidery took me to this page, with its stunning example of a richly embroidered shisha'd garment. By clicking on the buttons below the image, you can view it in fine detail. A world map shows the textile's origin, there is brief and interesting text, and you can choose to go further and view:

• more textiles with mirrors
• more embroidered textiles from India
• drawings of stitches used
• a drawing of mirror work
• other works from the region
• interactive activities for kids
• multiple entry points for other works in the collection. 

By generously putting its collection online in such an ingenious way, the Museum truly fulfills its mission of "connecting cloth, culture and art," -- some of my favorite words -- in a way that's easy to navigate and incredibly valuable, whether your interest is Asian textiles, Native American leather and beadwork, European and North American quilting -- you name it. The cultural diversity of Canada makes this a starting point for a virtual textile journey to almost anywhere on Earth.  You can also visit the Museum's home page and see current exhibitions. 

The Textile Museum in the United States also has a good Web site, though not as fully developed. Can anyone recommend other textile museums and collections with strong Web resources from around the world? 

When you're full from the rich feast that these sites offer, go and cleanse your visual palate at Linnet, a Japanese site (with English version) with a blog and shop that specializes in exquisitely simple and beautiful linen fabrics. There are also some intriguing patterns, if you like the spare Japanese aesthetic, and I want all of these linen ribbons, especially the gray with a delicate line of silver stitching. These ribbons look like they're woven on the straight grain but it did start me thinking about making some linen bias tape. Linnet ships abroad; prices are in yen but you can do a quick currency exchange here. 

When you're ready for the next course in your visual feast, Karen Cattoire is an artist doing some wonderful contemporary shisha embroidery. This is from her Bead Journal Page. 

Tools for the Creative

This has been a challenging week for all kinds of reasons, and the brilliant posts I'm writing in my head are not making it to the page. I got seriously bogged down in the blog software problem, but it does seem to be solved by the download of a new browser -- Opera -- and the eventual successful transfer of my 933 bookmarks (yes, I have clutter to clear even in my bookmarks). Now I have to get used to it.  

I'm on the extreme Macintosh end of the computer continuum. When I had to travel with a PC for my last job, I always felt like I wanted a sign on it saying, "This computer is not who I am." My brother Roger good-naturedly thinks this means I've completely succumbed to Apple marketing, and maybe so, but it's been that way as long as I've used computers, since the dark ages of the penultimate decade of the last century. It's the difference between a sense of complete drudge, always doing battle with a tool built with arbitrary, convoluted rules, versus having a tool that feels like an extension of myself, one that fits. Yes, that cute Mac guy in the ads has done his work well.

It's only problematic because my salary has never been quite who I am either, so when the time comes that my computer needs an upgrade, I have a mountain to climb. That time is fast approaching. Apple, listen up! Don't you want me to be a creative, non-technical tester for your newest Macbook Pro, with a new iPhone thrown in? Pretty, pretty computer:

For now, I keep on with my very nice, and really not-that-obsolete iMac. And on that trusty machine, I've found a couple of links to share: 

• Judy Coates Perez at Painted Threads has a really good tutorial on her design and painting process for her stupendous Tree of Life quilt. It's a very inspiring piece of work and a great view of her process. 
• Jude and Acey have both talked about shisha mirrors lately and I've been wanting to work with shisha for a long time; I think I'll use them in the background for the bead embroidery I'm working on. This tutorial at Joyful Abode is very good for the basic embroidery technique, and what a smart idea to use those big flat pailette sequins for practice or even for real -- I've found them in colors on the dollar shelf at the chain fabric store. She uses a fairly thick yarn but of course you can use any thread or floss that you like. If you'd like to try a traditional sample of Indian embroidery with shisha, visit this project at Stitch  magazine at the Embroiderer's Guild site, which also has stitch instructions. Their project page  is rich with ideas and techniques.

On a more philosophical note, Queen of My Own Destiny has this very interesting post (and thank you for the link to this site) on why she balks at calling herself an artist. We've had a lovely e-mail conversation too. I think I understand her reluctance, and sometimes I share it, yet I'm not sure I completely agree with it. That's my next topic: why, even for those of us who long to be sitting firmly in the artist camp, it's so hard to own it sometimes. It's fair to say that all the time we spend debating art, craft, who's an artist and who's something else could be better devoted to just working (and that choice alone would define you as an artist), but there does seem to be something worth exploring in the particular strange dimension of people who work creatively with textiles, how we differentiate ourselves from hobbyists, and why it's sometimes so damn hard to claim the title of artist. 

Meanwhile, if you want a kick to just get down to work, I'm always a fan of Gaping Void's How to Be Creative list (and good news -- it's becoming a book). 

If there were an easy answer to this, somebody else would have come up with it by now, so I'm not promising that, just some further thoughts that I hope will be stimulating. 

Restore the World

I spent some time this morning luxuriating in the Textile Art group at Flickr and came across the work of Jackie, a master embroiderer in the U.K. whose blog is Dogdaisychains.  A quick round of emails ensued and she gave me permission to publish one of her photos (click to enlarge and go visit her site for more photos):

Her beautiful work made me think of Hundertwasser, the extraordinary Austrian artist:

I know it may be hard to see the connection from these images alone, but Jackie's organic shapes and vibrant colors and rich shiny materials instantly made me think of Hundertwasser. If you don't know his work, there are quite a few books available, and you should be able to find something in the library. You're in for a treat.

On an entirely separate Internet journey this morning, I was searching for a new copy of a wonderful book on writing that I once owned by Deena Metzger. I found much more than the book on her Web site; she's a medicine woman and a deep and radical thinker with some very interesting texts and talks on healing, something I've been immersed in thinking about and practicing this year. I want to share this quote, from a talk Metzger gave called The Soul of Medicine. It's about beauty, a Slow Cloth quality that I haven't really done justice to. This helps:

"One of the qualities necessarily connected to healing is beauty. The natural world is inherently beautiful. Beauty like love is a fierce power that restores the world. The healer’s power is greatly diminished if it is not associated with beauty."

Quite a few people in my world are also attempting some deep healing right now, of themselves, their relationships, their purpose, and the world we live in. It's not easy. Things do seem to get worse before they get better, and a lot of faith and patience are required.  Sometimes I/we aren't sure where beauty fits in, in a world where our notions of beauty are so distorted or devalued. So I like this authoritative declaration that beauty is necessary to healing. It's not frivolous; it does nothing less than restore the world.