Category: Craft

  • It’s barkcloth…

    Barkcloth is probably familiar to most readers of the blog but maybe not these textiles. Barkcloth is made by pounding inner tree bark over a hard surface until the fibres mesh together. Across the globe barkcloth is produced in this way and the studio collection has examples from Africa and the Pacific. This map shows…

  • All about skirts

    An exhibition in New York is all about skirts. The show,  “Wool Skirts,” is just about to finish on March 15 at Sudestada in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, and it is a display of 130 skirts and 29 new pieces by artists and designers. These were made using 47 skirts from the collection, which…

  • Jean-Claude Bissery

    A new window display for autumn features a printed hanging by the French artist, Jean-Claude Bissery. Known for his use of vibrant colour and design, the piece hanging in the studio is entitled “Boucheron”, which translates as “woodcutter”. In the image a man strides through a forest filled with autumnal leaves, carrying a cut tree…

  • The first cloth

    The first cloth ever for the West Coast Cloth Company is nearly ready to come off the loom. The warp and weft in this cloth is Jamieson’s yarn from Shetland, the last of the cones that I brought over when we moved to the West Coast. I was inspired by the colours of the Coast,…

  • Fighting gender imbalance… with knitting?

    In Denmark knitting is making a political statement. Huzzah!

  • Philippine woven textiles

    This week a Canadian visitor to the studio mentioned the intriguing banana fibre textiles from the Philippine Islands. The oldest known of these pieces in the world dates back to the 13th or 14th Century. It is an ikat cloth (as you can see on this link) and was found on Banton Island in 1936.…

  • Threads of Belonging

    A new temporary public art show is about to be installed in South Sacramento’s Valley Hi-North Laguna Library. The textiles mural is an homage to the immigrant communities of the area, HMong, Filipinx/a/o, and Palestinians, who have contributed to the living history of the Californian capital city. The art work is combined with workshops and…

  • Cataloguing the textile collection

    As regular readers of the blog will know the textile collection is in the process of being correctly stored and researched, thanks to volunteers. Some real treasures are being unearthed while this work is going on and one of those is a hunger cloth by the charity Misereor. In 1976 Misereor reinvigorated the “Poor Man’s…

  • Stansborough

    The farm of Stansborough is a diverse enterprise that includes a rare breed of sheep, woven cloth and a whole lot of dedication. Stansborough uses old looms to produce cloth. These looms are the oldest of their kind still in use in the world – they were made in the 1890s – and the fabric…

  • Rethinking textile printing

    Most of us will be familiar with pigments and dyes derived from rocks – ochre, lapis lazuli… – but maybe textile printing can help rescue polluted water. This project, Crushing the Rocks, by Petra Vicianová, a textile designer and doctoral candidate in the textile department at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava,…