sweetgeorgia

From wallace+sewell to Textile Futures

Travelling to London has kept my interest partly because their designers, artists and craftsmen are so well supported and encouraged by the local councils that they appear to be able to innovate and create more. So for me, it’s not just yarn tourism… it’s the search for signs of future growth and the pushing forward of an entire textile and craft industry. I’m looking for something more than just the mechanical workings of a traditional hand loom or traditional fair isle designs updated in contemporary colours. I don’t know what it is, but I’m looking.

On the way, I get distracted by shiny, pretty things and some of the most vibrantly coloured, interesting and luxurious woven items I have found in London are designed by Wallace+Sewell, a pair of weavers who graduated from the Royal College of Art almost twenty years ago.

Located at the corner of Amwell and Lloyd Baker Streets just south of the Angel tube stop, the shop is seriously tiny, but stacked from floor to ceiling with silk, cashmere and wool blankets and scarves. Last time I visited, they had a “pillow” event, so the centre of the shop was piled high with pillows made from their woven designs in all different colours and textures. This time, I think the silk organza scarves were new… and these plasticized fabrics too. This was some of the most intriguing work I saw… very contemporary and very topical. Selvedges from handwoven fabric was compressed with vinyl plastic in order to create a new “fabric” which was then made into handbags.

I love love loved these. Scraps of woven silk fabric laid in quite a thick chunk of plastic making some really interesting bracelets, earrings and brooches. Just some very inventive ways of using up the little bits of extra fabric.

And of course, perfectly sheer and delicately coloured woven silk organza scarves. Not entirely innovative, but still beautiful to see and touch.

Where else in the world is really, truely new textile design and innovation happening? And I don’t mean textile art. I mean functional textile design for use in fashion or interiors. Emphasis on functional. Where do we stop just making pretty things and start making things that improve people’s lives in tangible ways? For a while now, I have been following the work and research being done at Central St. Martin’s in their MA Design for Textile Futures, mainly because I was interested in possibly studying there (but can you say “hello, life long student loan debt”?), but also because there is no program like it anywhere. Where else do students create interactive wallpaper, light-reactive window shades, and “architectural textiles for localised urban food production and environmental monitoring”. I don’t even know what that means. But when you pair creative and innovative textile designers with Nobel prize-winning scientists… well, we can just be optimistic that our future lives will be benefitted by their new discoveries.

Spring in London

I’m back to loitering in London again. This time, staying at Jen’s flat near the Angel tube stop… making it painfully easy to get to the lovely little Loop yarn shop. Located on Cross Street, it’s a tiny shop tucked into a corner with nothing but a small pink sandwich board outside. 

There’s a nice selection of Louisa Harding, Debbie Bliss, Alchemy, Blue Sky Alpacas and Be Sweet yarns here. But my lovely score was a copy of Kim Hargreaves’ book, “Heartfelt: The Dark House Collection“. She’s published all her solo designs … for sale … without kits! It’s like I’ve been living in a hole or something. Anyhow, I like it.

Just across the street from Loop is Tribe… a gallery full of handwoven rugs from all over the world. They were closed today, so I could only paw at the window.

On this trip round, I’m mostly living off of a box of cereal, one gigantic cold pizza from La Forchetta, and a whole lot of fruit… but yesterday, I met up with a girlfriend who took me for afternoon tea near London Bridge. The shop was SO precious… painted a pale frosty pink with tea cups suspended from the ceiling with thumbtacks! Ingenious space saving idea. I sat directly underneath the tea cup constellation and enjoyed my earl grey and lemon cake. Thank you, Charlotte.

Every shade of white

It’s breathlessly beautiful up here at Whistler Blackcomb. I’m almost tempted to not return to real life. Almost.

It’s pretty white up here though and sometimes all you see is miles and miles of white marked with tiny little coloured flags. But it’s fascinating to me… you think that all you see is white and nothingness, but really you see all the subtlety of light and shadow and every shade of white you can imagine. Cool white. Warm white. White in the morning light. White in overcast light. White in blindingly beautiful bluebird skies. I fully expect and look forward to being visually assaulted when I return to my yarns and dyepots next week.

Inspi(red)*

Now that we’re pretty much exactly halfway through 2007 now, tell me, what’s the most inspiring thing you’ve seen or experienced in the past six months?

Maybe it’s because today is my loom’s one-year anniversary, I’m feeling all sentimental and wondering what I’ve been doing all year and what I’ll be doing on this day next year. Between now and next June, I’ll be attending a month of lectures and workshops at Maiwa’s symposium. So far, I’ve registered for Michelle Wipplinger’s Colour Institute II, Dabu Mud Printing, Ajrakh Blockprinting (including the masterclass) and the Working Traveller. I wonder if Charllotte will let me just pay rent and live at Maiwa East for the month of October… the place is already furnished.

Charllotte is also looking at arranging a Maiwa trip to India in February 2008 and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to participate in that. They’ll be travelling to a number of different villages where the dyeing and textiles are made for Maiwa. I’m not sure how long the trip is for, but if it’s only a couple weeks, I may choose to stay a few weeks longer on my own. Who knows.

Also, I’ve been looking at the Kawashima Textile School in Kyoto and possibly spending some time there weaving, dyeing and studying. This is the same school that Chisako Hisamatsu attended to get a more in-depth education in Kasuri (an ikat technique). You could live, weave, eat, sleep, and dye there for anywhere from a few days to a few years. Dreamy. Possible? Impossible? Who knows.

Where else can I go? Indonesia? Thailand? Sweden? Denmark? Hmm… My desire to live someplace warmer (seriously, I’m sitting next to my heater and it’s nearly JULY) has me thinking about the textile/fashion program at CCAC in California too (although San Francisco is not much warmer than Vancouver, bleh). Hmm…

My time in London was WAY too short and I’ll have to find my way back somehow. I didn’t, unfortunately, get to meet up with Amelia and her friends and would love to do that next time. There was a knitting exhibition at South Wimbledon that I missed because I was running around quite a bit (even though I was at Wimbledon for a couple days, grr) and of course the one day I picked to visit the V&A is the one day the textiles room was closed. What did I see…

The “New York Fashion Now” exhibition at the V&A. The DOBAG rug woven for the British Museum. Some of Preeti Gilani’s textile work… hand-dyed silk and Jacquard weaving. The room full of massive Mark Rothko paintings at the Tate Modern (I went to see this TWICE, I loved it so much). Helio Oiticica’s Body of Colour exhibition at the Tate Modern as well. And something I wish I had seen for real:

Ptolemy Mann completely floors me. I’m absolutely in love with her work. What are you absolutely in love with these days? What inspires you now?

Okay, never thought I’d name a post after a GAP product, but hey, it’s all good. One of the only things I bought in London was a product Red t-shirt… african cotton made in Lesotho. It would make Jen proud.

Not so lost in Lesotho

Today’s post is very, very special. My friend, Jen, a talented spinner/knitter/weaver herself, writes about her experiences travelling to Lesotho and the significance of the yarn industry there.

As a dedicated knitter I try to do my bit for yarn tourism whenever I go anywhere. I was recently visiting my friend, Mahesh, in Lesotho and Felicia has graciously granted me guest blogging rights to tell you about my yarn experiences there.

Some of you may not know where Lesotho is. I didn’t, until Mahesh moved there and I looked it up on a map. It is a small, mountainous country completely surrounded by South Africa. The mountains provide plenty of grazing land and as a result the Basotho people raise a lot of livestock — including sheep and goats. I strongly suspect (based purely on speculative observation, not statistics) that there may be more sheep, cattle, horses and goats in Lesotho than people — you can’t go anywhere without seeing some sort of grazing animal, usually accompanied by a herdboy dressed in Basotho blanket and some sort of hat. Some of you will be familiar with lovely South African mohair (for instance, Be Sweet, which you can find here in Vancouver at Urban Yarns) — well, Lesotho produces mohair as well. So I was pretty excited to see what Basotho yarn tourism had to offer.

First, I visited [Elelloang Basali Weavers](http://www.africancraft.com/artisan.php?sid=76069721454232588809650922363153 &id=elelloang). I would have missed the building entirely were it not for the clotheslines festooned with newly dyed yarn, drying in the sun in the yard next to the road. The inside of the building is inspirationally lined, floor to ceiling, in columns of pop and beer cans (how many Fantas does it take to weave a rug?). Inside, 3 or 4 women were busily weaving blankets and rugs on basic, 2×4 framed tapestry looms. I watched them painstakingly weaving small sections of complex patterns using their fingers — this is nothing like using a big floor loom or even a table loom. Awed into submission, I bought a rug for probably more than I should have paid, thinking, if these women can spend that long on weaving one inch of rug, I can certainly pay for it.

Remembering my stash, I then plucked up courage to ask about yarn. It turned out that not only do the Elelloang Basali Weavers weave, they also prepare, spin and dye their own yarn. The spinning takes place on a simple, homemade wheel made out of a bicycle wheel (making me think of Charkas for Africa, affixed again to a basic wooden frame. Here is a photo of one of the weavers pretending to spin for my benefit (for the camera, of course, as the wheel wasn’t set up, as you’ll see if you look closely!). Awed again at the thought of how long it must take to spin a rug’s worth of yarn on a bicycle wheel, I then bought a kilo of worsted-weight washed mohair yarn.

Still reeling from the pop cans and the yarn, we got back in the car and drove to Leribe, a bustling town in north-western Lesotho, stopping along the way to take photos of the sublime scenery. I wanted to visit Leribe because of the Leribe Craft Centre, which was set up to provide support for disabled women. It turns out that Leribe offers entirely different products than Elelloang Basali… beautiful, finely woven scarves and shawls, gorgeously patterned tablewares, and even intricate knitted and crocheted shawls that made my own attempts rather humbling. And all done in the same soft, fine mohair that took my breath away. I bought shawls and scarves there for everyone I knew and then peered over the shopgirl’s shoulder and saw this:

Babbling incoherently, I somehow made it known that I wanted to go inside and look. I successfully fought off the temptation to throw myself on the pile of mohair (just how comfortable is a 6-foot-high pile of mohair?) and restricted myself to fondling it. It transpired that the shopgirl herself had spun most of it and to my surprise she was kind enough to make a gift of some to me. Here I am, weighing my mohair, surrounded by yarn. Do I look giddy?

That was it for yarn tourism in Lesotho, but here is a gratuitous sheep photo. This is Bart (who knows how to pose for the camera), the sheep-about-the-house at Malealea Lodge, a lovely place high up in the mountains that you should all visit once in your life just to see the view.

The special thing about my Lesotho yarn experience is that it brought home to me just how spinning and weaving is still very much women’s livelihood in many parts of the world. In a place like Lesotho, where there is a high prevalence of HIV/AIDS and many men work as migrant labourers in South Africa, the ability of women to support themselves becomes especially important. So think about where your yarn comes from the next time you supplement your stash, and do your bit by buying products from organizations like Be Sweet and Leribe Craft Centre, to support women who, like you, love to spin and weave — but for whom every metre spun, every inch woven, goes to support their families.

– Jen