Red Thread Studio

Sweethearts of the Rodeo

A friend of mine was joking about her taste for country music, and it reminded me that I've not written much about western wear. Country-and-western clothing is a textile art form all its own, especially when it was executed by masters like Nudie the Rodeo Tailor.  After all, what are our indigenous North American textile traditions? We've got Amish quilts, Navajo blankets and weaving, Hawaiian shirts, and yes, western wear.

my boots

When I first came to Colorado, I had a musical mentor who taught me about traditional country music and about Gram Parsons, the cosmic American cowboy himself. Naturally I started noticing the textiles that went with the music, and cool girls like Emmylou and the earliest iteration of the Dixie Chicks who were wearing them. My appetite for kitsch isn't quite what it used to be, but I still have a few pieces I love, including this 1940s shirt made of wool gabardine - it's very fitted, as might be expected from the "hollywood" label, so it makes for a very stylish vintage look. I think the buttons are not the originals.

And then there's the cowboy shirt I made back in the early 90s in Chicago, very sloooowly, with hand-beaded fringe, emroidery and applique. I wasn't brave enough to try smile pockets at the time. Folkwear has a pattern for very traditional western-style shirts with instructions for smile pockets, if you want to try your hand at it.

 

 

And this is what remains of a vintage canvas jacket, now patiently waiting to be creatively repurposed someday:

 

Not long after the cowboy shirt project, I'd moved on to making some rather loud but really fun pieced and appliqued vests, many of them for my musician friends. I'll put those in another post. But cowgirls were some of the most audacious and independent women in American culture back in the day, and even if you -- like me -- have never been on a horse, it's good to remember we've all got a little cowgirl soul.

Feeling the Felt

As I visit the Smithsonian museums, I'm wishing I could get to the coolest of them all, the 

Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. I've mentioned the Fashioning Felt exhibition; definitely go and visit the exhibition Web site and the Museum blog.

Artist Janice Arnold made and installed a yurt at the exhibition. From the Museum blog:   

The traditional yurt is a trellis-frame tent covered with thick, humble felts made from raw sheep’s wool. The largest, most elaborately decorated tent is the place of celebration, songs and epic poems. Arnold’s design is a fantasia on the yurt form, which is still the preferred environment for events of spiritual significance, even as nomadic peoples become more urbanized. 

Arnold will create a total environment from her luxurious handmade felts, which combine Merino wool with silk and metallic fibers and sheer fabrics. Her technique allows for the creation of richly textured areas in combination with gossamer sheer ones. The wall panels will use that sheerness to maintain the light-filled feeling of the Conservatory, while the leaded glass pattern of the ceiling inspired a mosaic of sheer and opaque areas. The window seat will be covered with a thick, dense, hand-beveled felt, to enable visitors to experience felt’s tactility and contemplate both its history and versatility. 

The fabric panels composing the walls and ceiling are so large that they have to be felted outdoors at Arnold’s studio in Centralia, Washington. Nomads felt in the spring and fall, but Arnold’s team has been working through the winter to complete the installation. Unseasonably cold temperatures coupled with record snowfall have made it challenging work indeed. But the Palace Yurt, both traditionally and in this contemporary interpretation, is the place to gather for celebration when the felting is done.

This sounds amazing, doesn't it? The sketches and samples from Arnold's sketchbook, at the yurt link above, are -- my favorite word -- fascinating, and very beautiful. Here's one:

 

sketch by Janice Arnold, Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum

I found a photograph taken inside the finished yurt here, on a lovely writing and poetry blog by Patricia Markert. 

Thinking about the yurt, I couldn't help but think about the stories in the news last week of tent cities around the country, growing alarmingly fast. Nomads living in fabric houses aren't new to the world, but we've lost the skills to make and use these beautiful, safe and portable homes. It takes skill to fabricate them, imagination to beautify them, and a highly developed sense of community and mobility, I'm sure, to survive in them. 

I like the roundness of the yurt; like belly dance, it's all about powerful feminine shapes, where most of our housing and much of our movement in the West is angles and planes. 

Here's another photograph from the exhibition, with more curvaceousness. As I've mentioned before, I haven't succumbed to the felt craze, but as I see these images I think I could. I like it best when color is added, I admit, since one of felt's most appealing qualities is the ability to hold saturated, gorgeous color. 

Details, Details

I splurged today on Dress in Detail from Around the World,  a book I've wanted for a long time. I'm not really capable of walking past a bookstore without going in, and today as I was walking through Georgetown (it was a great, sunny day) a bookstore loomed up in front of me -- what could I do? Though I've had it in my Amazon shopping cart  forever, I'd never actually looked at the book, and one look was all it took. I couldn't wait to have it. It's very beautiful. 

I don't have a way to scan pages for you, but each page has both a close-up detail of an extraordinary garment and a line drawing of the entire garment, most of them traditional dress. 

At first glance, the lesson of this book is that there is nothing new under the sun in terms of techniques, but there are infinite opportunities for expression, mastery and beauty with those techniques, and endless sources of inspiration in every culture and every era.

I hope to get to the Textile Museum this week, though I'm going to have to exercise restraint in the bookstore. Tomorrow night, I've found a dance studio that will let me do some drop-in classes while I'm here. 

The blog has been busy these days! Thanks for coming by, whoever you are. I hope my strange tales of business travel and misadventure aren't disappointing you. 

Kindred Slow Cloth Spirits

Slow Textiles: Arousing Artefact is a brand-new blog from Dr. Emma Neuberg, a member of the Textiles Environment Design Research Group at the University of the Arts in London. Dr. Emma has just two posts up on the Slow Textiles blog, but she's promising details soon on a Slow Textiles Sewing Group. Will that be local or a group for the Internet community? I  guess we'll have to wait and see. 

The idea of slow cloth -- as in authentic, soulful, and honoring tradition and community even in the most contemporary manifestations -- is still the heart of this blog and everything I write about textiles, art, craft and design, after more than a year. It's exciting to see that there are others with the same impetus in other parts of the world, yet also frustrating that we're not connecting more somehow. I'll e-mail Emma and let her know that there are many kindred spirits here, eager to see what's next on her site. 

I know there is a form for the vision of what we Slow Cloth/global textile explorers can be together -- the larger Web site, the magazine, the organization, the book, whatever it may be (the field trip to London!). It seems I've beat this drum before, but anyone with ideas about what you'd like to see in the emerging Slow Cloth/Slow Textiles community that willing and imaginative enthusiasts could create - feel free to comment.

Even as I wrote that, I know there are forums and Ning groups out there with a slow cloth direction that I don't visit often. I think they're great, but it's an issue of time and focus. And there are some textile sites that, while clearly on the same track creatively, simply crash my browser, they're so loaded with videos and ads and music and links and feeds. So maybe things are fine just as they are, with different people doing their own thing and we all remain loosely connected. I don't know.

Meanwhile, I'm knee-deep in stressful life situations, so back to tax preparation. Thank you, always, for coming by and reading and visiting.

More African Design, Inspiration and Beauty

Thank you so much to everyone who commented so wonderfully on the last couple of posts (and bonus points to anyone old enough to recognize the Bee Gees song in yesterday's title). 

It seems I have new viewers who find this blog through the posts on African fabric and design. I don't know who you all are, but thank you for visiting! It's not too surprising, since beautiful African art and design is everywhere these days and people are looking for information and links. 

The African aesthetic can be both ancient and tribal, and bold and contemporary, and has inspired some extraordinary textile art, like that of Yvonne Morton. And of course, it fits perfectly in the cultural groove, given our new president's African roots and renewed appreciation for the gifts of African culture.

I went looking for something for a follow-up post, and got lost in the very bookmark-worthy Style Court blog, with many pages of posts on textiles and art, and great ideas about how to frame and use art. Here's her post on African style.  

SUNO is a new company using vintage African printed fabrics; designer Max Osterweis collected fabrics from Kenya over the course of a decade. "The prospect that Kenya's recent post-election turmoil might keep foreigners from visiting or investing in a country overflowing with natural resources, talent, and good will became the catalyst to actually do something with these collected fabrics," the site says. "Building a successful and visible company that employs local Kenyan talent, treats workers fairly, and showcases some of Kenya's artistry, could potentially effect positive and lasting social and economic change."

That sounds slow, sustainable and beautiful. This spring collection has 1,000 individually made  and numbered pieces, and the company employs sample- and patternmakers in New York as well as stitchers in Kenya. The fabrics are vintage kangas, printed cloth rectangles with a rich history and expressive language all their own, like so many traditional garments. 

Through the Looking Glass

I'm in that challenging stage of my "day job" -- writing 200-page market research reports -- where I can't really do much else; I'm pretty much at the computer day and night, swamped in stacks of paper and furiously trying to meet deadlines. E-mail is pretty much my only communication with the outside world. And beyond that, it's been a strange week -- not in a bad way, more in an Alice-in-Wonderland kind of way where I'm not sure if I'm coming or going (or, as the characters on Lost have been saying lately, when am I?).

So what I'm trying to say is that I don't have much time for regular posting right now. As a friend reminded me this week, I'm never at a loss for words, but right now the words must be reined in to focus on the market dynamics of flour, rice and grains. Glamorous, I know. 

I do have one quick textile note -- if you're in Ohio, the Canton Museum of Art has just opened an exhibition of the legendary landscape kimono of Itchiku Kubota. The artist spent his life trying to capture the mystery and beauty of a tiny fragment of cloth he saw as young man; read this fascinating piece on his search for tsujigahana.

According to this article in the Akron Beacon Journal:

The apotheosis of this exhibit is the series of 30 kimono, which, hung side by side, form the panoramic tapestry called Symphony of Light. Also included are 10 individual works, including kimono from Kubota's Mount Fuji series.

His plan was to create 60 kimono representing the four seasons, 15 each for fall, winter, spring and summer (which would include The Oceans), plus 20 more, which were to represent The Universe. 

But Kubota died in 2003 at 85, having completed 34 kimono and only two of the four seasons, fall and winter, plus five for The Universe series.

He left behind sketches and ideas for the rest so that his son, Satoshi, and the Kubota workshop could complete his dream. To date, one additional work for The Universe series has been produced. No pieces, however, have been added to The Four Seasons. 

On each of the robes in The Four Seasons series, Kubota has included ink-drawn flowers inspired by 16th-century tsujigahana-style textiles.

Kubota's ambitious vision is incomplete, but no less stunning for what he's left to our imaginations. This will be the last chance to see the kimono in the United States this year. 

Connecting the Dots: Cintamani

A couple of summers ago, I took a painting class from Joan Anderson, a wonderful painter who also works with textiles and ethnic garment shapes. On a painting break, Joan and I were looking at a book of ancient Asian garments, and many of them had a textile pattern of three dots arranged in a triangle shape. We had a conversation about it; Joan said that it was a common pattern. I  remember telling her that it was a motif I'd love to work with, but it somehow seemed too simple. She encouraged me to try something simple, and I made some painted notes in my sketchbook:

Today I was reading old posts on Fibercopia and discovered that the pattern has a name - it's called cintamani, and it has a powerful tradition, especially in the Ottoman Empire, in Turkish garments and decoration. Cintamani means wish-fulfilling jewel, or auspicious jewel. 

Then I found this gorgeous fabric at Lost City, the textile design studio I wrote about a few posts ago (and which I believe I also found through Fibercopia, which is a treasure).  Here is Lost City's  description and photo of their Cintamani design:

Ground Red / 100% Silk

Embroidery Silk / Rayon

Color Red / Rich Yellow

Repeat V 4.6” / H 9.6”

Width 52”

Inspiration 17th C. Turkish robe 

Cintamani is one of the most distinctive motifs associated with the Ottomans, a term derived from the Sanskrit for “auspicious jewel”. Three balls are arranged in a triangular pattern and the motif is regarded among the Turkish people as a symbol to ward off evil. Embroidered on a crimson silk ground in bold yellow silk yarn.

As you know, if you've been following this blog, I've been working with shisha mirrors and fascinated by textile traditions that involve metaphysical protection and safety, so I was very excited to find another piece of this puzzle in the cintamani motif. I was both pleased with myself that I'd instinctively recognized something powerful, mysterious, and connected to the other ideas I was exploring, and also annoyed with myself that I hadn't really taken that moment seriously 18 months ago in painting class. But maybe it's all a matter of timing. Even last week, I was thinking about using the round mirrors in this pattern, not realizing that both the mirrors and the pattern, though from different countries, had a common purpose and thread. 

It also made me think of the dots that Jude has been working with in her beautiful raw, instinctive, soulful stitched pieces. 

So - this felt like a wonderful discovery to me. I knew I liked the pattern, and I knew there was something there for me to use, and now I know it has a name and a meaning, and my instincts were good. And who doesn't need a wish-fulfilling jewel right about now?

I guess this, then, is a story of synchronicity, and a reminder to trust your creative instincts and to never dismiss or discount something that feels too simple or easy. Ease is good, and there's often more to what we see on the surface than we know.

Under the Full Wolf Moon

Tonight the Wolf Moon hangs close to the horizon and lights up the winter sky. The idea of wolves at the door is too close for comfort for so many people these days. But wolf medicine is powerful in Native American and shamanic lore, bringing great loyalty, integrity and intuition, and a strong need to protect the family and community. Wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone Park in 1995, and you can learn more about that here. 

I've decided to make a small postcard-size textile piece for each full moon this year, so I will work on that tonight, though I'm also knee-deep in deadlines for the current market research report, which keeps the wolves away (just barely) from my door, so this is a working weekend. 

I do have a few links to share. Arcadia is back from hiatus with several new posts on Fibercopia, and I'm so glad she's back, as she always has some amazing textile discovery. Her newest post is on Lost City Products, and do go read her posts and then visit Lost City's site. These fabrics are exquisite. The company was founded by Afshan Durrani, who studied at FIT and then looked for a way to use the textile traditions of her native India that are in danger of extinction; here is a part of her manifesto:

Lost City is driven by the desire to create the most beautiful hand embroidered fabrics in the world by employing artisans who would otherwise lose their livelihood. We believe that the extinction of the rare skills possessed by families that still earn their living working with needle and thread would deprive the world of a highly evolved art form that has existed for over five hundred years.

Most especially, visit the Process page on the site. There are several slideshows of the design and embroidery steps, and I dare you to watch them without being almost irresistibly moved to get up and draw or stitch.

Here is one Lost City fabric, called Jewel, with this note on its inspiration: "16th C. Mughal writing set. This stylized floral spray is taken from a Nephrite jade writing set embellished with diamonds, rubies, and emeralds set in gold. Northern India, circa 1700. Embroidered on a black silk ground in tones of ruby red, emerald green and gold wire."

Doesn't that infuse this ordinary day with astonishing beauty and romance? These fabrics are luxury purchases. . . just one pillow would be a treasure. Oh, and Lost City has a blog, too, that will take you to some magical places. 

There is more beauty to be had at Ruth's new and improved Impulse of Delight Web site, where she sells her lovely handmade jewelry and hand-dyed yarns. I especially like this Fire Within necklace, and this Ancient Eye necklace has me imagining an entire belly dance costume designed around it, in layers of turquoise and lapis blue and coral and gold.

It's hard to come back to reality from these sites, but I must . . . I have another fun link but I'm waiting for permission to post the pictures, as they're not commercial.  

In honor of the Wolf Moon, I leave you with lyrics from the wolves themselves, Los Lobos. I met these musicians in my long-ago days working at e-town, and they are some of the most talented, soulful, generous and down-to-earth humans I've ever had the pleasure of meeting -- you can hear all of that in their music.

Standing in the pouring rain 
All alone in a world that's changed 
Running scared, now forced to hide 
In a land where he once stood with pride 
But he'll find his way by the morning light 

Sounds across the nation 
Coming from your hearts and minds 
Battered drums and old guitars 
Singing songs of passion 
It's the truth that they all look for 
The one thing they must keep alive 
Will the wolf survive? 
Will the wolf survive?
      -- Los Lobos, Will the Wolf Survive?

Why We Stitch, and Why I Read . . .

Does it seem like I'm always linking to the New York Times? I actually have a story that explains my irrational loyalty to that paper (or skip down a few paragraphs to the stitching part). My father, a physicist who then became an advocate for experimental education and especially early reading, started my reading lessons when I was an infant. The promise was that the reading lessons would end on the day that I could read a paragraph from the front page of the New York Times. This was a big deal; in those days, you actually had to go to New York to get a New York paper.

When I was four years old, I passed the test, as my father brought home the revered paper and I solemnly executed the Reading of the Paragraph. I didn't have to understand all the words, but I did have to read them. And then I would have to go sit on a stage and read whenever he spoke to groups about education. So it's completely programmed into my brain, I guess, to read the NYT. 

I'll spare you the downside of my father's novel-yet-controlling and perhaps damaging approach, except to say that I never had a book read to me just for the pleasure of it -- it was always a lesson. I don't advise that, moms and dads. Read to your kids just for the joy of sharing the story and the closeness and the time. Don't make it a performance test. It backfires. That said, I'm very pro-newspaper.

(As a grown-up, I fell hard for a man who read to me from the Arabian Nights. Who cares if it was a time-tested seduction move -- someone was reading to me! Sweetest thing ever.)

Back at the ranch, what's in today's New York Times, available now at the click of a mouse (and isn't that magical)? "Seeing History in the Eye of a Needle," a review of 'Twixt Art and Nature, an exhibition of 17th century embroidery at Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts. The review comes with a slideshow full of beautiful images, and also offers eloquent justification for why we stitch:

One of embroidery’s great attractions is its self-evident structure. Many of its stitches are challenging beyond belief. That much is confirmed by a video in the galleries and a catalog essay by Cristina Balloffet Carr, a conservator at the Met. The essay’s close-up photographs of stitches are magnified 30 times, making it all the easier to appreciate the nearly superhuman evenness of technique that abounds in this show. Metallic threads, glass beads, appliqué, relieflike passages called raised-work and fluttering bits of stripped ribbon (good for tents and flowing skirts) are added options.

But the basic concept of embroidery is like rudimentary geometry. It centers on the merging of two very different dimensions: a flat grid of fabric, and thread, which is an extended line of many colors. This is achieved by the hands, eyes and brain of one person, who attends by one stitch or another to every centimeter of a work’s surface. The simplicity and concentration are always felt, no matter how complicated the actual motifs become . . . 

Embroidery is a glorious byproduct of sewing, one of the world’s most essential crafts. Sewing began sometime in prehistory, probably when pieces of animal hide were lashed together into a crude garment. But humans never cease. The marvels of this exhibition testify to the human need to improve, refine and perfect, turning a means of survival into a sublime vehicle of expression. 

Beadwork Basket
English, unknown designer and maker
1662-7. Glass beads, wire, silk thread.

Back to reading for a moment, since it's a good season for it as the longest night approaches. . . Fascinated by the story of the face transplant surgery, and intent on adding voluptuary to my life job description, I've started re-reading Diane Ackerman's A Natural History of the Senses. It's one of my favorite books ever, and probably easy to find at the library. Highly recommended.

Oh, and apparently women used to be made to do stitching because it was thought to make them docile. Ha!

Ways of Chronicling the Journey

I apologize if you've been seeing text over images in recent posts. It doesn't appear that way when I preview the post, but I just learned that it shows up that way on the site. I've fixed several but let me know if it happens again.

I'm fascinated by the work Dijanne is doing with her traveller's blanket and traveller's medallions. Imagine the experience of being a traveler before there were cameras, or guidebooks, or postcards; how inventive to build the story of the journey in cloth and stitches. Dijanne's versions are, of course, modern and personal and imaginative, yet always conjuring an echo of ancient travellers whose work has informed her.

In the same vein -- (and stay with me here, I realize that sometimes my connecting of dots comes out like mental hairpin turns to those who aren't in my brain, and actually sometimes it feels that way to me too) -- Sharon B. on Pintangle linked to the newest issue of Bonefolder, a gorgeous free-to-download e-zine on book arts. In this newest volume (Vol. 5 No. 1), book artist Susan Allix has written Colours of Persia: The Making of a Book (page 19 in the magazine). It's a beautiful account of her decision to make a limited-edition book of prints that tells the story of her travels through color. Allix writes, "Travelling around this country with my bag of crayons, sketchbooks, notebooks and camera, I had been quite overcome by its colour. There were turquoise domes against blue or black skies, sun-baked courtyards containing ever-repeated patterns of yellow and ultramarine tiles, glittering mirror work, piles of rosy pomengranates, eye-stretching fields of acid green rice crops. I could buy woven textiles from nomad people and rescue fragments of old blue and yellow ceramic from the gutter to remind myself of the colours when I returned to London. Travellers in Persia always seemed compelled to write of their experiences. In using accounts which stretched from the 1st century AD until the present day and setting them in the places in which they were written, a mind picture could be built across time showing both the continuity and vicissitudes of life. The intimate and narrative qualities of a book, together with its images, lend themselves to a travelling progress." 

Allix, a master book artist and printmaker, has also made a limited edition travel book on Egypt, on view here. Her prints and books and words are all magical. 

If you like printmaking, definitely visit Marja-Leena's Web site; Marja-Leena visits and comments here (and thankfully set me straight on my Swedish-Finnish confusion in the Marimekko post) and her site and work are both stunning. 

One more link . . . the movie Australia has just opened here, and All the Rage has a terrific interview with costume designer Catherine Martin, and her creation of "a staggering 2,000 costumes from 1930s-era vintage gowns to traditional aboriginal dress." I love reading the backstory that Martin creates to arrive at a look; it's a reminder of all that clothing communicates if we look carefully.