I don’t go looking for these things, people — I swear. They come looking for me.
1. Suno Fall 2011
2. Isabel Marant via Metier
3. Unknown
Do tell if you can identify that last one. I might like to wear it. Whereas the Suno I really would hang on the wall and gaze at admiringly.
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I’m on a plane to LA again today, but wanted to point you toward a few compelling things elsewhere:
1. Have you seen Jared Flood’s swatches? Sick.
2. Cephalopod Yarns wants you to knit something for Afghans for Afghans. If you knit a hat, mittens or socks for the cause, they’ll give you a skein of their yarn in return. Click here for details of the Cephalopod free yarn offer, and here for specifics of what the NGO involved will accept. I’m in.
3. This interview with the Ace & Jig designers about their process developing woven fabrics in India makes me completely green: “Through friends we were very fortunate to find our current team, as we’ve been able to create fabric that’s very specific and technically difficult to weave. When we’re in India working alongside each other, it’s so much easier to experiment. They have these walls of yarn and we can be like, ‘oh, let’s do these colors instead’. It’s so much more hands on.” Nice work if you can get it!
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When I was in art school, getting my graphic design degree, I remember being jealous of all the other majors in the building: the ceramicists, the jewelers, the printmakers, the industrial designers — each with their uniquely messy and tactile studio/workshop spaces scattered around the building. I was equally jealous of the architecture students whose building was joined to ours by an enclosed bridge. The sole exception in all this was the fiber majors. The designer in me could at least understand those who were at the pattern-design end of things. But the fiber artistes left me utterly envyless. I never even paid a visit to their floor of the building! Much less took a class. I can remember seeing their senior shows in the little gallery near the entrance — lots of abstract woven things on giant looms, is how I remember it — and thinking really enlightened things like “What is the point of this?” and “This is the 90s, not the 70s!” Poor uptight little me.
Now, if you’ve been reading this blog you know I did a lot of macramé as a kid and now have a renewed interest in hairy purses and other “practical” applications, but it’s about 98% nostalgia-based. I still can’t look at a fiber-art piece like the one seen above — in the home of Morgan Satterfield (of the supremely envy-inducing Brick House blog) — and appreciate it in any remotely non-ironic way. But I can appreciate it in an ironic way! I mean, that is a specimen. So that’s progress, right?
But my point here is that I fantasize sometimes about going back to art school, spending more time soldering and sawing, and less sitting in sterile computer-design classrooms. And you can guess which department I’d most like to set up camp in. Mm hm, the one with all the fiber.
Me and my wasted youth.
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(Photo by Morgan Satterfield)
I happened across this sweet blog, Found While Walking, where artist-florist-weaver Jaime Rugh posts photos of kids and excursions and found objects and food and flowers. Regularly interspersed are shots of these beautiful, multi-colored squares woven on an enticingly simple nails-in-a-picture-frame loom — a wabi-sabi relative (known as a Weavette?) of the plastic potholder looms of our collective childhood. And now I know how I’ll find my way into weaving.
See also: Angela Tong’s mini version
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(Photos by Jamie Rugh)
Martha McQuade, of the drool-inducing Scarfshop, has taken up weaving. I have been trying to keep my loom yearning at a low simmer on the back burner and that photo is not helping.
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