4

form in

Contents

INDULGE textiles to buy, collect or simply admire 24 Twenty-four shopping days As the countdown begins Selvedge founder Polly Leonard takes a peek at some of the most tempting gifts around. 23 Come to the fair Join Claire Fletcher, Julie Arkell, Nigel Atkinson and a hundred hand-picked designer-makers, antique textile dealers and haberdashery vendors at the Selvedge Winter Fair 44 Finely fashioned Former model maker for Jim Henson's Creature Shop, Sarah Strachan, shows us how her delicate miniature mannequins are made

CONCEPT textiles in fine art 50 Growing on you Artist, photographer and stylist Ania Wawrzkowicz embraces change in her work as exemplified by this unusual tabletop installation. 56 COVER STORY Sensitive type Photographer Rinne Allen’s reveals her childhood fascination for the antique cyanotype process and its continuing adult appeal.

INDUSTRY from craft to commerce 42 COVER STORY Peak performance The Arpin wool mill moves onwards and upwards. Geneviève Woodrevealshowthestruggling companysteppedbackfromthefinancial edgeandregaineda firmfootingintheworldoftextiles 46 Secondhand innovator Designer Gloria Margenat Arxe made her future from the past JaneAudas discoversthisearlyadopterofthevintagetrend.ReadmorefromJaneatwww.shelfappeal.com

GLOBAL textiles from around the world 20 COVER STORY Red alert Neeru Kumar’s passion for crimson textiles is captured in images by Nelson Sepulveda, former Art Director of Bloom magazine, and Paris based photographer Mark Eden Schooley. WrittenbyJessicaHemmings 96 Waste not Regular contributor Sarah Jane Downing investigates the multiple domestic uses of Yak fibre in Tibetan and Mongolian culture

ANECDOTE textiles that touch our lives 37 COVER STORY High climbers The Blessing of a Good Thick Skirt Kate Strasdin, associate lecturerinTextilesandDressatUniversityCollege,discovershowpioneeringfemalemountaineers turnedtheircumbersomeclothingtotheiradvantage 52 COVER STORY Midwinter feast Slow food meets slow fashion with natural dyeing. Katelyn Toth-Fejel and Sasha Duerr, co-directors of the Permacouture Institute, demonstrate how nature can provide the perfect ingredients for a celebration. IllustratedbySusyPilgrimWaters 73 Fabric swatch No.11: Nun’s Veiling Sarah Jane Downing casts her eye over this modest fabric IllustratedbyBristolUWEgraduateRubyTaylor 75 Canvas Selvedge Editor Beth Smith wonders if gift giving is what the Americans like to call a ‘teachable moment’? And asks if it’s the thought that counts who should we be thinking of?

16

lge indu

Alpaca Knitted Tie, $93, www.aliciaadamsalpaca.com 02 Lemon Peel Baseball, $34, Paul Cunningham, www.kaufmann-mercantile.com 03 Indigo dyed cotton shibori scarf, $328, www.shopterrain.com 04 Hand-Painted Linen Tablecloth, $248, www.shopterrain.com 05 Backpack, £125, Kate Sheridan www.vandashop.com 06 Wild rose white cotton girls pajamas, £45, www.designersguild.com 07 Marabou feather brooches, £12, www.plumo.com 08 The Original Eco-Luxe Bakers Twine, 240 yards, £15.99, www.selvedge.org 09 Fruit Picking basket, with leather handle and cotton shoulder straps, $104, store.kaufmann-mercantile.com 10 French portrait cushions, AU$280 Pascal Palun, Linen, 60x60 cm, www.legrenier.com.au 11 Boucherouite rugs, from rural Morocco, £???., www.hay.dk 12 Merchant and Mills Sewing book, £20, merchantandmills.com 13 Leather boot logo canvas tote, 45 x 33 x15cm, $250, Stanley & Sons, apronandbag.com 14 Women's Long Underwear, top $138, bottoms $85, Ramblers Way, www.ramblersway.com 15 Rabbit egg cosies, £14, www.whippetgrey.co.uk 16 Fabric bracelet, €105, Cécile Boccara, www.cecileboccara.com 17 Christmas Muffler knitting kit, £35, Blodwen, www.blodwen.com 18 Superior crackers, £45, Liberty, www.liberty.co.uk 19 Wooden slingshot, $21, store.kaufmann-mercantile.com 20 Wooden beavertail snowshoes, $276, store.kaufmann-mercantile.com 21 Shetland Throw in moorland, 180 x 150cm, £75, www.knockandowoolmill.co.uk 22 masks, £??.00 www.hay.dk

1 7

in d ul g e selv edge.org s e l v e d g e . o r g ire insight insp inform selv edge.org

32

global selvedge.org

And there was no hesitation when I was going to spin or lace for the first time, I just knew how! However, with ‘male’ chores I always felt insecure. It was a long time before I understood that I could do those just as well.”

What Ralf knows about traditional textiles he learned by looking at old ribbons, quilts and clothing. When new times and new ideas came there was haste to get rid of old garments, and the skills and craftsmanship that created them started to disappear. Ralf recalls a woman who let a chest filled with hand-sown chemises be carried away and trampled in the dunghill behind the barn. But he also tells about the excitement in looking around in the attics of the old houses, and the happiness when he found textile treasures from the time when tradition and handiwork were valued.

In the 19th century decorative patterns revealed the parish where a textile was made. Ralf wove copies of these old ribbons and textiles. Today he knows the language of patterns like the back of his hand and is able to weave variations that still retain a clear affiliation with his home parish. He has researched them too: “when the culture of local costumes still was a living tradition, there was a fascinating mix of conservatism and delight in novelties. Various techniques of different periods were mingled in the same garment. And when synthetic dyed yarns came offering brighter colours, these took the place of ‘duller’ ones in traditional patterns.”

Ralf studied to become a music teacher, and spent his professional life with the violin. During breaks he went home to take care of the cows, and when the summer arrived he migrated, together with the animals, to live in Bastberget, once the largest concentration of fäbod in Scandinavia with over 90,000 units. From the women, practised in old skills, he learned how to make all the different kinds of cheese laid out on the table: gubbost, nysilaost, missmör and gammelost. Ralf considers it a sport to treat his guests to a piece of gammelost (a highly fermented cheese) and observe their reaction. He thought the cheese was a bit scary the first time he tried. Later he got used to it.

Ralf became an expert in weaving techniques and traditional clothing. He revived the patterns that had adorned the ribbons of his home parish after a hundred years of neglect. Others have now learned how to weave these patterns from him. At home in his apartment a loom was installed and Ralf wove the colourful fabrics used for draperies and blankets for beds – although according to tradition they are not meant to be used but are for the sole purpose of impressing visitors.

When Ralf retired he wanted to move to the lands of his childhood, and succeeded in buying the fäbod in Halgås from an acquaintance. His cottage is the notion ‘untouched’ incarnate – everything feels genuine, a far cry from the modernised fäbod holiday homes that are common in this part of Sweden. This fäbod is to be found on maps dating back to the 17th century but the current buildings were built in the middle of the 18th century. The summers here were not as isolated as many others; the distance was short enough to allow several visits to relatives who stayed at the home farms during the summer.

Ralf’s corner of the world consists of a collection of sun-bleached buildings grey from age. The only thing missing is the cowshed: that building is always the first to decay because of all the manure. For a long time Ralf planned to build a new barn, but his seventy-six years4

2 5

g l o b a l ley

Schoo

Mark Eden lveda &

Sepu lson its: Ne

Photo cred ley

Schoo lveda photography Mark Eden

Sepu lson

Ne irection

Art D

Indian designer Neeru Kumar’s embroidered and woven textiles were photographed in the heat of New Delhi and offer a contemporary expression of the traditional textile techniques that abound in the Indian subcontinent.

For several decades Neeru Kumar has worked with indigenous knowledge and materials to explore their relevance for the contemporary market. Her work includes a range of traditional techniques such as kantha, khadi, jamdani and ikat, as well as jacquard and treadle weaving, and strikes that crucial balance between sustaining traditional knowledge and its adaptation for contemporary design.

The collection includes kantha, where simple running stitch is applied to soft, worn cloth – often old sarees – stitched together as layers of fabric. What was once just a leisure activity for rural women in Bengal has, thanks to Neeru Kumar’s initiatives, now become the livelihood of thousands of women in Bengal. Similarly, the resist-dye technique of ikat practised by weavers in Orissa, a state in eastern India, now contribute new motifs to Neeru’s collections while helping to sustain an endangered craft.

Kumar graduated from the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad in 1980. Her sophisticated collections have made appearances at Maison et Object and Pret a Porter in Paris and Hiemtextil in Frankfurt. Her flagship store, Tulsi, launched in 1987 in New Delhi, enjoys a loyal following. Outside India, her shawls, scarves, ready-to-wear garments and home furnishings are carried by such notable arbiters of taste as London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, The Conran Shop, Anthropologie, New York’s Guggenheim Museum and Caravane in Paris.

Here Kumar’s palette focuses on the many shades and textures of red. It is colour as mercurial in meaning as it is in life. Red is the colour of blood,

warning and passion. Think of Anish Kapoor’s installation Marsyasin the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, inspired by the Greek myth of Marsyas who had the bad luck to be flayed alive by Apollo; or the intricate brick work of Arts & Crafts founder William Morris’s Red House. American author John Steinbeck’s Red Pony or Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter make colour central to their narratives. In film we see the little girl’s haunting dress in Schindler’s List – a rare moment of colour in a black and white film – and the frantic obsessive dance of a young tormented ballet dancer in The Red Shoes, based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale.

The routes used to create red cloth are nearly as varied as its symbolism. Natural dyes such as pomegranate and madder root are used in textile dyeing to enhance the colour red; aged Moroccan carpets are washed in saffron to refresh their deep hues; the bodies of cochineal bugs offer yet another source of blood-toned dye – which caused a stir recently amongst vegans who unwittingly enjoyed Starbuck’s pink-hued summer drinks.

Victoria Finlay, in her book Color, looks back to the fugitive reds the English painter J.M.W. Turner knowingly used, and which today leave much of the once flaming sunsets of his seascapes to our imagination. The bold crimson "Jantar Mantar" observatory in New Delhi, commissioned in the early 1700s by Maharajah Jai Singh II, has weathered time better. The five architectural scale astronomical instruments have weathered time more successfully. This fascinating complex shares nomenclature with the very machines of weaving that produce Kumar’s designs: “supreme instrument”, “invention” and “mixed instrument” when translated into English. Apt inspiration for the richly hued textiles Kumar continues to develop today. Jessica Hemmings s e l v e d g e . o r g

3 3

g l o b a l s e l v e d g e . o r g

38

anecdote selv edge.org at that point) describes a particularly hair-raising winter traverse in which her party were climbing in the dark with only one lantern between them, no food and only a little brandy, before resting for the night in a snow cave: “…it was a new experience but to me a most enjoyable one.” What she does not mention is that she actually lost two toes to frostbite.

And so to the skirts. There can be little doubt from the range of photographic evidence that long skirts were worn successfully by many women who participated at some level on the mountains. They were able to stride, step up and stretch around the obstacles of the rock and snow in such a way that would have been impossible had the skirts not allowed considerable movement. Modern Western expectations of comfort and ease of movement in dress cannot be applied to those expectations of the 19th century. Just because women wore the skirts, however, does not mean that they did not make some minor adjustments: and numerous techniques were employed whereby the skirt could be altered temporarily to accommodate a particular requirement.

One such strategy, revealed in many surviving images of women on the mountainside, was simply to loop the hem of the skirt up and secure it to a number of buttons around the skirt creating a swagged effect. A similar technique to the looping of the skirt that was also widely in use in the 1860s was that of raising the skirt internally through a series of tapes and metal rings, much like a roman blind. Thus the wearer could raise and lower the hem of their skirt as desired depending on terrain and company! Inventiveness was key. Meta Brevoort mastered the technique of unlooping her looped skirts with her ice axe or Alpenstock if strangers were seen approaching.

As the 19th century drew to a close and women began to experiment with more radical clothing for sports, the skirt retained its importance, bound up as it was with important contemporary notions of femininity and taste. The noted climber Elizabeth Le Blond, first president of the Ladies Alpine Club, wore a skirt whilst walking in ‘civilised’ company: but as she reached the slopes of the mountain, she removed her skirt to reveal a pair of tweed knickerbockers. She famously retraced the steps of an entire day’s climb having discovered that her skirt had been forgotten at the summit and refusing to re-enter the village without it.

The dawn of the Edwardian era saw a burgeoning recognition of women as consumers. Companies such as Burberry, who had been designing mountaineering suits for men, acknowledged the role of women in the sport and designed corresponding garments for them, advertising the robustness of their wares through illustrations of intrepid ladies clinging to a rockface in the latest Burberry climbing gown. They began to appropriate a vocabulary that is familiar in our modern consumer society, reassuring the potential Alpinist that their clothing was reliable in the extreme.

Such technological language reinforced the Burberry ‘spin’ though descriptions of new fabrics such as ‘slimber’; ‘…a cognate material of fine and silk-like texture of remarkable durability and rain-resisting power…’ The company adopted the modern device of demonstrating superiority in design by incorporating modernity and cutting edge technology into their marketing strategy. All of this is specifically aimed at women. Women in skirts.

The final words belong then to the women themselves. Those pioneers who overcame the elements to reach summits, traverse ice walls and returned to tell the tale. Women such as Gertrude Bell who customarily dressed in an ankle-length black skirt on her many exploits in the Alps. After scaling an almost blank rock face with her two guides, only to find themselves stranded in freezing conditions, she noted: ‘eventually we made a tent out of my skirt and lit a match under it…’ Stoic and resourceful, they dressed according to their social expectations and carried on regardless. Kate Strasdin

3 9

a n e c d o t e s e l v e d g e . o r g

52

ire insight insp inform selv edge.org

Midwinter feast SLOW FOOD MEETS SLOW FASHION WITH NATURAL DYEING

5 3

in d u s t r y

Waters ilgrim illustrations by Susy P

In Northern countries, winter is a time of subtle colours during the day and long hours of darkness and lamplight. When the full bloom of flowers and fruit seems most distant, root vegetables from the frosty ground and jams or canned foods are served, giving us a winter supply of preserved energy from the summer sun.

One of the thrills for the natural dyer using local resources is that different seasons bring new colours. Like food, textiles that follow the seasons for their colour are a celebration of the time of year and locality. Similar to wine regions, a place can be known for the dyes and colours that are particularly suited to its climate, soil conditions and water source.

Oddly, many garments sold as ecologically conscious seem to ignore the source of their colour. To bring awareness to the origin of textile colour, the Permacouture Institute hosts seasonal ‘Dinners to Dye For’: events that display a relationship between food, the source of which is usually common knowledge, and naturally dyed colour. These workshop and dinner events allow guests to experience both the nuanced yellow of fennel on silk and the taste of a caramelised fennel quiche, or the deep hues of charcoal acorn dye on a handspun linen tablecloth, followed by the sweetness of a carefully prepared acorn bread fresh from the oven. On display is the vastly under-acknowledged versatility and usefulness of plants. Unbeknownst to the general population, many of our most common foods are secretly excellent dyes or have useful medicinal qualities.

The collective awareness about the Slow Food and Organic Food campaigns is inspiring a ‘Slow’

fashion and textiles movement. Of the three basic human needs, food, clothing and shelter, food is the most easily accessible. This has helped initiatives such as Organic, Fair Trade and local agriculture to be so successful. Clothing is not consumed quite as literally as food but the production of textiles uses the same resources that are required to make food: land, water, air and soil.

Natural dyes are like fruits and vegetables; once you taste a locally grown heirloom or old-breed tomato compared with a standard supermarket, bred-forshipping tomato, it’s not much of a choice. Local natural dyes can be sustainable and ‘slow’, offering an alternative that can be low-energy, low in water usage, biodegradable and available from sources that are renewable and non-toxic. This is in contrast to most industrial dyeing, which generates toxic waste and uses tremendous quantities of water. It should be stated that natural dyeing can and has been done in such a way that also uses toxic chemicals. However, unlike synthetic dyes, plant dyes offer processes which are non-harmful and require little additives or none at all. Natural dyes are an alternative that needs development, along with nonpolluting and low water usage synthetic dyes.

While synthetic dyes offer speed, uniformity and are cheap, the rare properties of natural dyes have their own rewards. They can feel magical, being complex in the way the natural world is complex. Anyone who has viewed the stunning transformation of indigo dyeing will have a sense of what this means. Unlike synthetic dyes, which create cloth of a pure tone, when naturally dyed textiles are viewed in sunlight they shimmer. The eye mixes the various tones imparted from the plant, an experience akin to viewing a Seurat painting from afar.

While processed natural dyes can be sourced from all over the world, one way that plant dyes can be extremely ‘light’ and ‘slow’ is in the vast potential for using the waste or invasive species found locally. Excess resources of agricultural and urban systems provide colour that does not call for allocating more acreage and energy to dye crops, and many byproducts of the food industry are excellent dyes and assists. This includes onion skins, rhubarb leaves, carrot tops, avocado pits and nut husks.

Many natural dyed textiles are actually more light and wash resistant than your average synthetically coloured ones. However, there is creative potential for using the dyes that fade as well. A dress that is re-dyed to a new colour each season, but with little or no environmental impact, could be a beautiful and interactive product. Such fluidity shows how natural dyes fit in to ‘whole systems’ thinking, where waste products are used for colour and all materials used in the process can be composted to benefit the next crop.

To capture the colours of the winter season for yourself, use cast-offs from the wood stove or fireplace. Brown dye can be created from the sweepings of chopped wood, and ash is used to change the pH of dye baths. Yellow and red onion skins are useful for shades of golden orange to bronze green. Many nut husks will give brown or pink and contain tannin, which reacts with iron to give dark greys.

For a mid-winter ‘Dessert to Dye For’, try these recipes for cherry bark dye and preserved cherry bakewell tart. Bare of leaves and fruit at this time, the cherry tree still provides bark, from which green, yellow and orange dye can be obtained. 4

s e l v e d g e . o r g