Category: Uncategorized

  • Shelly Zegart

    Quilts can these days be considered art, rather than simply utilitarian textiles, thanks in part to Shelly Zegart. The “Queen of Quilts” as she was once called, Shelly Zegart was not a quilter, nor even a stitcher. She became interested in quilts after tea in the 1970s with Bruce Mann, a collector from Louisville, Kentucky,…

  • The Spotify playlist

    Most weeks the blog features a playlist of audio curated on Spotify, the streaming platform. The playlist tracks are linked in some way to the blog entries and paying subscribers will hear all the tracks uninterrupted. Those with a free subscription will hear the tracks with advertising breaks and anyone else will hear short extracts.

  • A short blog this week

    Thank you to everyone who sent emails and comments about the blog last week. This weekend I am away to Rotoiti to give a talk at the Creative Fibres retreat. As we are leaving on Friday, the normal day for writing, time is short so the blog will be too! Normal service will be resumed…

  • Conversation and Cloth

    On Friday this week there was the latest in the series of Conversation and Cloth, the talks about textiles in the collection. Taking place in the Regent Theatre, the talk was well-attended with twenty people coming along, and a couple more on Zoom, to listen to news about the most recent acquisitions and about plans…

  • The West Coast Cloth Company

    The West Coast Cloth Company

    The street frontage of the textile studio in the heart of Māwhera/ Greymouth is complete. Over the past few months two local artists have been working with me to create the new logo for the West Coast Cloth Company. The logos have now been printed and installed on the windows of the studio and above…

  • All about the blog

    This is a week of change, for the blog and for the studio, and I am looking for your help. For the past twenty years I have written blog entries on all sorts of subjects. There have been articles on nature, weaving, crafts, painting, writing, landscape, travelling… the list goes on. Over the years the…

  • Design Lessons from Nature

    The library in the studio in Māwhera Greymouth has as section of books about design, amongst them some that relate to nature. A 1974 edition of Design Lessons from Nature has just been added to that collection. Written by Benjamin deBrie Taylor and published in the United States, the book contains the “substance of talks…

  • Basotho blankets

    The textile collection continues to grow and so does the cataloguing. The most recent addition to the catalogue, thanks to our Canadian friend, Karen, who volunteers time to do this research and to write up the texts for the website, are the Basotho blankets. These particular examples are common across South Africa. Locally produced, they…

  • What’s on the playlist

    This week the playlist features Sámi by Black Magdalene ​Based in Eugene, Oregon, this darkwave ensemble was formed in 2011. Darkwave is a music genre that evolved from post-punk and New Wave movements in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Dakota by The Stereophonics This Welsh band had their first number one on the UK singles…

  • This week’s blog

    Dear readers, This week the enormous crates and boxes arrived from the UK in Greymouth. The task ahead is mammoth – how to pack the Shetland studio into a much smaller space in New Zealand – but already most of the boxes are unwrapped and the contents stored. It feels very good to have everything…