This is for those who haven’t seen this decade-old segment which for some reason has been making the social media rounds again.
Apart from the wrongness of a blanket with this much historical import and value ending up in a private collection, for some reason I found it remarkable to see a textile get this sort of detailed attention especially from men.
I was talking to the very knowledgeable owner of a shop of antique weaving in Cuzco, Peru, and after a while he mentioned that Mick Jagger had been in the shop two years before. When I asked if Jagger was in Peru to do a gig, he said no, he had come to see Machu Picchu.
I first noticed these cylindrical handwoven bags on a couple of delegates at the UN World Urban Forum in Medellín, Colombia. They looked unusually sturdy, very finely handwoven in wool, and all had unique and beautiful geometric patterns. A week later in Bogotá I realized they are actually quite common.
“If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places—the activities that are intimately associated with boredom—are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well.
The photo above shows the central living area of a rural farmhouse on the border of Tochigi and Ibaraki prefectures. The house was restored by Kenji Tsuchisawa who bought it as a rundown heap when he was only 20, after seeing a photograph of a traditional Japanese farmhouse on a Tokyo magazine cover.
The bottom photo shows a functioning scarecrows made of indigo-dyed hemp. The original book caption reads “The bold design of this piece of shibori-dyed hemp by Seizo Ishikawa, a farmer, seems at home working as a scarecrow by a newly harvested rice field.” The birds in Japan must have been accustomed to seeing farmers in real Japanese indigo yukatas, waving their arms.
Or personal Twitter lidsville
Or Medium @ounodesign
Or Criticl lidsville
