Category: Travel

  • The Whitby Coast Bonnets

    Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, the famous English photographer, captured images of women wearing bonnets in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Thanks to these photographs we are able to see the patterns of the cloth, the evolution of the bonnets and the very practical reasons why they became everyday wear for women working on the…

  • Easter and the bonnet

    In your Easter bonnet with all the frills upon it,You’ll be the grandest lady in the Easter parade. In 1917 Irving Berlin wrote “Smile and Show Your Dimple”, a melody that would, 16 years later, become “Easter Parade”, with those opening lines. In 1948 Judy Garland and Fred Astaire were the stars of a film…

  • CTANZ symposium 2026

    The Costume and Textiles Aotearoa New Zealand’s symposium is open for registrations. Each year this event draws lovers of textiles and costumes together to share a weekend of exploration and enthusiasms. This year the symposium is in New Zealand’s only City of Design, a UNESCO designation: Whanganui. Registration for symposium is now open. Join us…

  • Threads of Heritage

    A new short film from Zimbabwe brings together fashion, storytelling, and an iconic printed fabric. Pfeka is a clothing brand from Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. The brand came up with the Masvingo print, a cloth that was inspired by Great Zimbabwe‘s massive stone ruins with its chevron and herringbone patterns. Now the print has,…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…