Travels, Berlin, and hand dyed fabrics.

I'm just procrastinating before dyeing some fabric. It is quite an upheaval to move enough stuff out of the laundry area in order to set up all the dye buckets. Maybe I will work outside today, it is windy but warm here in Wellington, New Zealand.

I'm going to be experimenting with the recipes in this book. The Fabric Dyers Dictionary.

My usual 'go to' dyers book is Color by Accident by Ann Johnston, but today I feel I'd like to try something new.

In the man time here are pictures from our trip to berlin, very little textile work, and mostly fantastic graffiti.

Travels, Art and Textiles : Boston

After San Francisco I headed over to Boston to see another old school friend. I'd seen her several times over the years but I have never visited her at home. I had no idea that her house is on the edge of a State park. She may have told me years ago, but somehow I had never worked out what that meant. Her garden is teaming with birds, squirrels and I even saw chipmunks. I spent quite a long time with the camera zoom lens trying to take pictures of all the birds and animals.

It was in Boston that the trip became more about textiles. We did a day trip to Lowell. I had read about Lowell when I was looking at the history of the cotton industry as part of my research on cotton and its effect on the environment. Lowell was full of cotton mills and employed a lot of young women from very rural areas. The mill owners were keen that the girls were well looked after.  There were boarding houses with strict matrons, evening lectures and a chance to earn money and be educated. they worked hard but it seemed like it was a lot healthier than the English cotton mills.

I loved Lowell and would have liked to have spent longer there. It was Autumn and the trees were starting to change color, and there was so much cotton history to explore.

We went to the American Textile History Museum which had a touring section of the Fiberarts Exhibition on display while we were there.

Gigantic looms which still work

 I love this black and white woven bedspread and wonder how I could translate this into cloth.

We also went to the New England Quilt Museum which I found a little disappointing but I think that is because I am not a traditionalist. It had some nice costumes and some of the fabrics were great. I'm sure if I lived there, I would use the library. They had a sale of second hand books which people have donated to the library. Quilters all have extensive book collections and she they downsize or move on, they or their families donate the books to the Museum . If they already have a copy they will sell the duplicates as a fundraiser. I didn't see anything I needed but it was worth a look. 

On another day trip we went to Newport and I was amazed at the enormous mansions which were only used as 'holiday homes'. The mansions are filled with gold, glitter, statues, marble and other expensive fittings. They were used for about 4-6 weeks a year and crockery, cutlery and table linen were moved back and forth between the owners multiple homes. I realized that the fictional character Cora, from the Downton Abbey TV series was supposed to come from this sort of family.

 On a much more austere note, this is one of the childhood homes of Louisa May Alcott. It was an experiment in community living which her father was involved with, but it failed in about 10 months after the families nearly starved. They had arrived too late in the year to plant crops and the men were away when the crops needed to be harvested.

Pumpkin time in New England.

I really loved the area around Boston and would love to go back and explore for longer next time.

Below are botanical and zoological specimens made from glass. These are part of the collection of Harvard University and are on display there. It is quite hard to believe they are glass, the workmanship is extraordinary.

 Below is part of an exhibition of fibre art at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (ICA)

Work by Ernesto Neto

Although I went to the gallery to see the Fibre art show, the exhibit I most enjoyed was called 'The Visitors' by Ragnar kjartansson  It consisted of 9 video screens showing musicians playing a song in different rooms of a large house. They can only hear each other through speakers. They appear to walk from screen to screen and eventually end up all on the same screen walking away downhill still singing.I found it mesmerizing and am still thinking about it today. I do hope that it eventually finds its way to our city gallery.

Travels, Art and Textiles : San Francisco and Boston

After Seattle I flew down to San Francisco to meet my husband who was on his way back to New Zealand from a meeting in Europe. It was the start of my trip and I didn't want to weigh my luggage down too early so I didn't really visit fabric shops and although I tried to visit galleries I found that many were closed , including MOMA, which is closed for construction at the moment.
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One really fantastic thing happened in SF, I met a friend who I went to Hospital Hill School with in 1972 in Nairobi, Kenya. Karim and his partner had recently spent some time back in Nairobi and had been back to our old school. It was really great to meet him again.

I did take pictures of carousel horses. I was trying to work out why some of the horses look so scary. The San Francisco carousel horses would give a child nightmares with the whites of their eyes showing and baring their teeth. Even the zebra looks angry.

Scary teeth, looks like it is going to bite.

Eyes with the white showing or eyes with no whites. Just weird!

I also enjoyed trying to show how contented the seals at Fishermans Wharf look. It was quite a nice sunny, warm day.

Travels, art and textiles : Seattle

I've been home about 2 weeks after spending 7 weeks away in the U.S and Europe. It has taken a while to recover, fix up the garden and catch up with projects. Now I'm going to do a bit of a catch up of our trip over the next few days with an emphasis on art and textiles. However, I didn't see a huge amount of textile art while I was away and a lot of my photos are of the wonderful architecture of Prague and Copenhagen. Maybe something will result from that 'research' later.

I started in Seattle. There is a reason for Seattle.
In 1992 I had my first child and was completely wiped out by the birth and the disruption to my creative life. My husband took paternity leave but  went into his study one day. leaving me to wrangle the unsettled and constantly hungry baby. He came out  later that evening and said he had set up the internet. I wasn't particularly interested, had never heard of the internet and anyway I was tired, so I perhaps wasn't as enthusiastic as I should have been.

 After a few weeks things were different, I was very glad of the lifeline that the internet turned out to be. I joined QuiltNet and was only the second New Zealander to join. I later met the only other New Zealand member of QuiltNet, she lived in Wanganui (about 4 hours North of here) then, but now lives in our street in Wellington. Its a small place, New Zealand!

Through the internet I also met an art quilter called Carol Castaldi who lives in Seattle.  I was a complete novice to quilting but Carol was very encouraging. One of the projects we were involved with was 'The Difference Project'. We felt our 'point of difference' was that we were on different sides of the world. We each started with fabric from our own country and we posted 2 partially-made quilts back and forwards across the world until we were finished or they were too heavy to post any more.

After 22 years we finally met in person and it was fantastic to catch up. Carol is a quilter who used beading in a way that I had never seen before, where the beads are not just embellishment on the surface but become part of the whole design. She uses beads the way I would use machine quilting to add a whole extra layer to the image.

While I was in Seattle we were able to go to the Dale Chihuly Garden and Glass
 which was fantastic. How important it is to have great lighting!

The cafeteria was where Dale Chihuly's extensive collection of accordions is displayed, suspended from the ceiling. Other collections are displayed under the glass topped tables and in cabinets around the cafe. While we were eating lunch, Mr Chihuly himself came in, he was wearing his trademark black eyepatch and painted sneakers.

Another highlight of the Seattle part of my trip was the Pike Place market. One of the fish market stalls is very entertaining as the fishmongers throw packaged fish from one side of the stall to the other.

 The crabs made a nice repetitive pattern all stacked in rows on the stalls, and they taste nice too.

 I was fascinated by the squirrels and birds which Carol and her husband feed from the verandah at the back of the house.

Something we don't see in New Zealand, full size plastic skeletons on sale in the grocery store just before halloween.

Lastly - I eventually left QuiltNet which became so busy that I couldn't keep up with the messages. I became a founding member of QuiltArt. I left that to become a member of a smaller group called Notrad (non traditional quilters) and joined Southern Cross Quilters. Then moved to even smaller groups which peak and wane.

Tomorrow on the grand tour - San Francisco and Boston

World of Threads exhibition, Canada, trip to Prague

Www.worldofthreadsfestival.com

If you are anywhere near Toronto, please go and see this exhibition and tell me all about it!

I'm in Prague at the moment, it's an amazing place full of art nouveau buildings.

I should have written more blog posts but wifi has been pretty dodgy till now.

The Giant Kimono

The giant kimono was devised and organized by Emma White and Sol from the New Zealand JET Alumni. Emma and Sol sent fabric panels and paint to  New Zealand school and Japanese schools and the kids decorated them and sent them back. Then they had to have eyelets punched around them so they could be linked together. About 10 days ago the work was hung for the first time and I gave them a hand to string the pieces together and sew an extra panel on the base, hence the crash hat.  This is what it looked like when it hung for the first time from one of the lighting gantries in the TSB arena in Wellington, prior to the Japan  Festival last weekend.

You can gauge the size by the people at the left hand side

Sewing in a safety helmet zone

I've never had to sew wearing a safety helmet before! There were electricians working on the catwalks above us. This is me sewing some last touches on the bottom of an enormous kimono which was hung in the centre of the TSB Arena for  Japan Culture Day last weekend.