February 11, 2009
The so-called “afghan blanket” seems to go to Value Village to die. It’s hard to know which is more disturbing: the synthetic nature of the object itself, or the fact that it is still, amazingly, given everything that has happened over the last fifteen or more years, called an “afghan.” A search online to discover the origins of this craft object immediately turned up “The All American Denim Stripes Afghan.” No lie!
February 4, 2009
Textile looms and computers share a common history; Babbage used punch cards in his Difference Engine after seeing a Jacquard loom at work. This carpet by Richard Hutten is called “Playing With Tradition” and it plays on the historical relationship of looms and computers by looking exactly like a digital image that has been pixel-stretched.
February 1, 2009
From the YouTube description:
Germany 1970. The German moderator discuss in the beginning how boring and lame the official looks are and that the fashion and color designers came up with the following outfits to make the game more interesting and colorful.
January 20, 2009
Supposedly raw blonde is a trend for 2009. I think that might be me, based on this definition. Warm but austere and at this point pretty pale.
This room somehow manages to be both sensual and monastic at the same time, so perhaps it represents the perfect refuge for a recession.
January 13, 2009
This amazing textile is actually the back of a quilt by Lauren Venell, but it could just as easily be the front. Venell’s fabric is dark blue denim, with light grey quilting thread to show the quilting design in contrast, and she pieced and quilted the whole thing by hand on the sewing machine.
December 14, 2008
Furoshiki is a traditional Japanese means of wrapping presents or carrying objects in a square of cloth. It’s waste-free, it’s practical, and it’s beautiful. As an art form, furoshiki is less known outside Japan than origami, but it is just as venerable – it simply uses fabric instead of paper.
November 2, 2008
These “modern nomad” or “urban nomad” styles appeared in Canadian fashion magazine Flare this fall, and Vogue and and others published similar photographs. Since fashion and other areas of design tend to be strangely prescient about historical circumstances – for example, American Depression-era styles were on the runway for nearly a year and a half before the recent stock market crash – does this interest in nomadism mean anything?
October 30, 2008
For the record, an image of the oldest fragment of textile ever found. This is a Neolithic fragment of linen from Egypt circa 5000BC—a shred of clothing that belonged to someone 7000 years ago.
October 8, 2008
Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer, Alvar Aalto and Arne Jacobsen used these rugs regularly in their interiors, which is not surprising. Their unusual combination of minimalism and handmade detail, restraint and inventiveness works well with modernism’s aesthetics by both echoing the abstract geometry of the architecture and also counterbalancing that austerity with some softness.
October 5, 2008
It’s strangely gratifying when a design or craft tradition thought to have arisen autochthonous in one place and from one people turns out to have a far more mongrel origin. In my experience, when looking at artisanal and other design, it seems that cultural borrowing and hybridity are overwhelmingly the rule rather than the exception and purity has nothing to do with it.
