textiles

New York loft with stripes

April 15, 2009

Probably everyone and his/her dog has seen this NYC loft apartment by now, and possibly also blogged about it, but this is one of those places that is so hypnotizing I can’t stop looking at it.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Japanese interiors – updated traditional farmhouses

April 2, 2009

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.

Categories: architecture, design, favourite, interiors, Uncategorised

Traditional Japanese scarecrows

April 1, 2009

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.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Man discovers darning by accident.

February 28, 2009

This blog post by Mr. Skona wins this week’s prize for ingenuity and charm.

My lovely wool socks (please excuse the pills) were starting to get a little threadbare around the heels and the ball of the foot.

Categories: design, DIY, Uncategorised

Shingle pillow by Anek Taanka

January 18, 2009

The textile company Anek Taanka, which means “infinite stitches,” was founded by Indian textile designer Varsha Sharma. She has said that “my challenge is to create pieces of textile that could inspire spaces to be designed around them rather than the other way around.” That’s a bold ambition but this pillow makes you think she could actually do it.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Elsbeth Kupferoth

January 16, 2009

Fantastic 1970s geometric supergraphic textile by German designer Elsbeth Kupferoth, who deserves to be much better known. Interesting short essay on her work and more photos at The Textile Blog.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

Wrap your bottle of wine in a furoshiki this year.

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.

Categories: design, green, textiles, Uncategorised

Soft modernism.

November 24, 2008

Hard-edged rooms, even the rustic kind, seem to need at least one big soft thing. Scandinavian interior design uses textiles in this way, and increasingly the term for the contemporary application of this idea seems to be “warm modernism” or “soft modernism.” The more unrelieved the hardness, the more warmth is needed and the more excessive the textures can be.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

The oldest textile fragment in the world.

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.

Categories: craft, design, favourite, textiles, Uncategorised

1 of 1 Design Studio – software art meets textiles.

October 28, 2008

1 of 1 Design Studio is a collaboration between textile designer Cate Reas and generative software artist C.E.B.

Categories: design, Uncategorised

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This blog is a long, somewhat messy photo essay on the history and politics of design. Design's socio-historical context—that is, the constraints and influences on the way we make objects, dwellings and cities—seems too often ignored. We no longer know where our styles, tastes or objects really come from, and this damages our creativity and sense of meaning. Historical knowledge is so fugitive in the New World, with everything so decontextualized in the rapid flow of commodities and images. Don't even get me started on tumblr and pinterest. As Fran Lebowitz said, "Designers now, they all have these things called mood boards. I suppose they think a sense of discovery equals invention. It would be as if every writer had a board with paragraphs of other writers—'Oh, I'll take a little bit of this, and that, he was really good.' Yes, he was really good! And that is not a mood board, it is a stealing board." As for the sort of design I'm personally interested in, full disclaimer.....read more ____________________________________

To read about my book project on Vancouver's UN-Habitat Forum event of 1976 concerning just and sustainable urban settlements, click here. Few know that Buckminster Fuller, Margaret Mead, Mother Teresa, Paolo Soleri and Maggie & Pierre Trudeau, along with many thousands of others, came to Vancouver in 1976 to talk about better, safer, fairer and greener cities worldwide. In fact it was the founding conference of UN Habitat, an agency built around a foundational document called The Vancouver Declaration. My book is about what happened that year and is a snapshot not just of Vancouver but of how people around the world began to view cities and themselves differently in the wake of, among other things, the first oil crisis. ____________________________________

textiles

New York loft with stripes

Japanese interiors – updated traditional farmhouses

Traditional Japanese scarecrows

Man discovers darning by accident.

Shingle pillow by Anek Taanka

Elsbeth Kupferoth

Wrap your bottle of wine in a furoshiki this year.

Soft modernism.

The oldest textile fragment in the world.

1 of 1 Design Studio – software art meets textiles.

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