1960's quilts-- memory and association

I have very specific memories and associations linked with fabric; it's inclusive in the way I experience textiles. Recently I took pictures of the fabrics in a couple of quilts my mom made in the sixties.  She would have called them "nothing special" quilts, meaning they were made for everyday use-- simple 9-square blocks put together with no particular plan. It's interesting for me to see what I was looking at on a daily basis growing up, and think about how that's shaped my love of fabric and prints.
Case and point, the black and white fabric above is a good example of the "handpainted" prints popular in the fifties, like the Eduardo Paolozzi textiles below.

Something about this fabric with bicycles,



rocking chairs



and teapots-- random objects floating through gray squares-- reminded me of the things flying by the window in Dorothy's dream in the Wizard of Oz.

(you can watch it here  if the video doesn't come up)








These scream men's shirts from the fifties.

















These remind me of the seashore and sailing.

Geometrics are paired with florals



 ..these medallions and hand-painted greenery brought to mind



the basil I planted recently, which is flourishing just like Lisabetta's in Boccaccio's Decameron.


Day IV, Novella 5.
Lisabetta’s brothers slay her lover: he appears to her in a dream, and shews her where he is buried: she privily disinters the head, and sets it in a pot of basil, whereon she daily weeps a great while. The pot being taken from her by her brothers, she dies, not long after.

...read more of the story here . 



This is William Holman Hunt's painting of Keat's version of the story.
Unlike Lisabetta, I credit the health of my plant to Miracle Gro soil, not to my lover's head buried in the pot.

Patterns gone awry and aright and all over the wall

....and what's wrong with this picture?
Earlier in the week I was working out the top half of the robe pattern, trying a couple of different versions of sleeves,  and basted one on upside down.  I immediately thought of having to hold my arm over my head all the time just to wear the robe, then I started thinking about how we try so hard to change our bodies to fit fashion, and then I wandered way off track into Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities" territory and  imagined a city of people whose bodies have mutated to accommodate the shoddiness of the garment industry.
That was about as far down that path as I cared to wander.

... paths, brains, wandering ...here is a diagram of the map our brain makes to locate ourselves in space-- for example, to remember where your car is in a parking lot.



Here's Neil Burgess explaining the idea in this TED talk 

Here is how is how we span space in steel.  Looks familiar. The structure itself is a construction of the force diagram as it appears in a physics book.

...close enough, anyway.  The point is that the same pattern that holds up the physical world around us is also inside of us, tracking where we are and where we've been.

This is an example of  a typical Islamic decorative motif.  Our aesthetic preference for complex triangulated geometry looks an awful lot like what our brain is doing when we're making a mental note of where the car is parked. Amazing.

Adapting a textile design to applique

This is a mock-up for an applique design I adapted from the 1950's textile design seen in the photo below.  I ran across it in a nice little paper-back called "Fun Fabrics of the 50's" by Joy Shih, one of a series she's written on vintage fabrics. 

For the lattice I used random black scraps of linen and cotton; the turquoise is Guatemalan cotton from my sister Kelli's leftover sewing stash.  The orange is silk, and the green, Italian linen.  The inset in the orange is rayon from some old palazzo pants I made years ago, that due to the wide, flowy legs, keep providing me with scraps. I like how the patterns, textures, and weaves of the fabrics bring another layer of complexity to the design.

This could easily be a pillow front but I'm not in a big rush to make it into a "thing".   For now I'm just experimenting, figuring out what I do (and don't) like to do, and little by little developing a system for living with,  i.e. organizing, lots of scraps. Gotta long way to go on that one.  

Doce de Coco

Burlap, rayon pants, 1960' cotton dish towel, leftover sewing scraps, silk, Italian linen

Doce de Coco from the album Obrigado Brazil.
The clarinet on this song is fantastic!

Connections-- ancient sounds and language

                        This morning, as I was listening to the birds, I kept thinking about Oliver Sacks' ideas in the previous post --- that we as humans are connected to nature through geometric patterns.  I thought about the bird sounds being patterns, structured through rhythm and repetition, and how they bring me a sense of not just familiarity, but also of completion, of wholeness.

I wonder if the sound patterns, like geometric patterns are inside of us, if the vocalization of the birds is stored as auditory patterns somewhere in our evolutionary DNA, if bird calls are as much a part of who we are as a snowflake.


I was thinking of Clyde Connell's series of Swamp Song drawings in which she recorded the sounds of the bayou by making thousands of spontaneously generated marks, effectively creating her own written language as she listened to birds and other swamp sounds.

Like Connell, I grew up in Lousiana; when I was very young we lived in the southernmost part of the state where the distinction between what is land and what is water is never completely clear.  Here are some of my  sister's old photos from a notebook she made during the time we lived near Bayou Teche.

Bayous, birds, ancient sound, evolution-- the word that comes to mind is...

at·a·vism
 noun \ˈa-tə-ˌvi-zəm\

Definition of ATAVISM

1

a : recurrence in an organism of a trait or character typical of an ancestral form and usually due to genetic recombination

b : recurrence of or reversion to a past style, manner, outlook, approach, or activity atavism

Origin of ATAVISM

French atavisme, from Latin atavus ancestor, from at-(probably akin to atta daddy) + avus grandfather — more atuncle

First Known Use: 1833

Oliver Sacks and "Hallucinations"

"Do the arabesques and hexagons, in our own minds, built into our brain organization, provide us with the first intimations of formal beauty?"


- Oliver Sacks, from his book "Hallucinations".   The quote references the geometric hallucinations that sometimes precede migraine headaches.  He points to this being a universal phenomenom, occurring in humans of all cultures, ages (Sacks himself experienced them as a three-year-old) and throughout history, one that connects us directly to nature through patterns-- an example being snowflakes.



"In this sense the geometrical hallucinations of migraine allow us to experience in ourselves not only a universal of neural functioning but a universal of nature itself."


- "Migraine-like patterns, indeed, can be found in Islamic art..."

"... in Zapotec architecture..."








"... Aboriginal artists in Australia..."




"..in Acoma pottery..."




"... in Swazi basketry..."

Consider a vintage jacket

I've been thinking about sewing, and what it means to make a garment for oneself.  Where do you get your design ideas?  What are your priorities?  What fabric do you choose and why?

This is a jacket sewn by my great-grandmother, sometime in the late 19th, early 20th century.  My great aunt saved some of her mother's clothes, and a couple of weeks ago I pulled them out to have a look and think about what it might have been like to make clothes a century ago here in rural Texas.



The red fabric has an iridescent, slightly metallic sheen.  It's lovely to look at, but kind of stiff and itchy.  Maybe some kind of rough-weave silk taffeta?  I wonder about the availability and expense of acquiring such materials in what was then a remote settlement, barely a town, in central Texas.



The trim on the jacket is a beautiful brocade which reflects the Japonisme movement popular in art and fashion from the late 19th into the early 20th c.   An example is this William Merritt Chase painting from 1898 called "Japanese Print".


She looks so comfortable in her kimono and chair.




Here is a portrait of my great-grandmother wearing an ornate high-necked blouse, typical of the period. I wonder if she sewed it herself and applied all the lace and trim.
Beautiful, but still, surviving Texas summers without air conditioning, wearing clothing designed for life in Victorian England?  That must have been rough.  And corsets.  Everyone wore corsets.
Comfort, particularly for women, I don't think was high on the priority list.



Design ideas and patterns?  I bet the deliveries of fashion magazines from "back East" were much anticipated.   Shapes and cuts in fashion illustrations were probably studied down to the minute detail.



I love the care she took in structuring the lines of the jacket.  It seems she was determined to make something fashionable, elegant, civilized-- in other words, a frock that denied the harsh realities of living in rural Texas. I understand the patience required, the intense desire to "get it right", and the tremendous sense of accomplishment felt when things finally come together according to plan.

The top-stitched seams on the back of her jacket remind me of the V-detail on the back of the kimono top I made recently.


I'd like to think there's some kind of familial design synchronicity going on-- Japanese influence, attention to seam detail and construction-- although my fabric choices lean towards cotton and linen, and comfort is high on my priority list.

I also doubt I'll be spending as much or more time structuring the inside of the garment as the outside of it...


It's the inside that tells the real story....  many tiny hooks for the shell....

and many more for for the lining.
Got to stay buttoned up.



So much spontaneous, just-make-it-work hand sewing inside that stands in stark contrast with the neat lines and seams on the outside.

It's likely she sewed her clothes on this machine...

....pumping away on the foot pedal.
In the summer, that must have been really hot.

Go granny go.