Category: Craft

  • Emily Van Hoff’s playful quilts

    Graphic designer, Emily Van Hoff, has come up with a new line of quilting fabrics. The new fabrics have been created for Moda Fabrics and will be available next year. Until then have a look at the artist’s quilts that combine weaving with sculptural techniques and colour to explore materials and their possibilities. See more:…

  • So she was turned to a pillar of salt

    Jo Rogge, an artist who lives between South Africa and Namibia, is non-binary and creates work that comments and highlights social issues that they have experienced. In this show, just ended in Windhoek’s “The Project Room” in Namibia, Rogge’s repurposed textiles take their place alongside visual art. The textiles are found pieces that have been…

  • Delft tiles… by AI

    Artificial Intelligence might be concerning to some but might it also be a useful creative tool? A new company based in the UK makes use of AI to allow users to enter prompts to generate images that are then transferred to ceramic tiles in the Staffordshire Potteries and fired. The resulting tiles are unique to…

  • The Spotify playlist

    Each week a selection of music is curated to go along with the blog. The playlist can be heard on the player above or by heading over to Spotify and searching for “Music to read a blog by”. The selections have something to do with the entries on the blog. Depending on the listener’s subscription…

  • Hawaiian quilts and island ecology

    A new book has just been published by Common Threads that explores fifteen contemporary quilts and their relationship to the ecology of Hawai’i. Marenka Thompson-Odlum, a Research Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford leads a project to enhance the Museum’s collections, commission new work and develop relationships with communities represented in the…

  • Italy in New Zealand

    Italian fashion is going to hit the Greymouth screen. Next month the Regent Theatre in Māwhera Greymouth is hosting the Cinema Italiano Festival/ Italian Film Festival. This event is in its ninth year and the lineup, according to its artistic director, Paolo Rotondo, is one of the strongest yet. One of the films to be…

  • CuzyT

    The recent trip to the Costume and Textile Association of Aotearoa New Zealand symposium in Whangārei included a surprising discovery. The North of the North Island/ Te Ika-a-Māui is home to Tāne Mahuta, the giant kauri tree. To get to it from the East Coast one travels across the island on a meandering road that…

  • A new use for newspaper

    Newspaper has a new lease of life in the work of South African Tamlin Blake. Tamlin Blake’s art is concerned with the ways in which materials can be used and reused. In her most recent work, newspaper is hand-spun into yarn that is then used to create tapestries. Presenting this material alongside mosaics and embroideries…

  • The Price of Memory

    In 2015, the National Gallery of Jamaica hosted an exhibition of 7 women artists. One of those artists was Miriam Hinds Smith. Miriam Hinds Smith is a Jamaican-born artist with a textile diploma from the country and a Masters Degree in Fine Art from the UK. Her art explores materials and indigenous knowledge, using textiles…

  • Peg Moorhouse’s loom

    Readers of the blog will know about Peg Moorhouse, the damask weaver from Aotearoa New Zealand. Peg’s loom is with her family at the moment and they are looking for anyone who might be interested in acquiring it to get in touch. The loom is from Sweden’s AK Joinery. It is a draw loom of…