Each Little World

A radical gift idea!

I am very good at ignoring advertisements and click-bait when I am on FB. But last week I was so smitten with an image that I fell prey to temptation — and I am glad I did! I discovered the Radical Tea Towel company and ordered half a dozen of their politically-inspired designs as gifts, along with the towel directly below for myself. 

Here's part of an inspirational message from the flyer that came with my order:

"It feels like modern politics has got a bit lost, doesn't it? In a world of rightwing populism, it's a lonely place for progressives, liberals and socialists alike . . . But scratch the surface of radical history and you realize there's always been hope."

The company is a family-owned and run business (that began on the kitchen table). The towels are manufactured in the UK from US cotton and printed with eco-friendly water-based inks. They also note that they have donated $15,000 to "good causes" and that they pay all their taxes.

I mainly ordered images related to women's suffrage but the images and texts printed on the towels run the gamut from RBG to Walt Whitman, FDR to Malcolm X, Crazy Horse to Martin Niemoller and on and on. Each image/event is explained when you click on the item on their website. 

I ordered my towels on a Friday and they were at my door the following Tuesday morning. The colors are true to how they appear on their website and the quality of the cotton is excellent. They'd make the perfect gift for you and all your "true blue" friends. 

Rumi O'Brien: A new book about her quilts and a talk at the Middleton Library

"Artist Rumi O’Brien’s quilts are intimate narratives of her life. Whether set in her everyday world of Madison, Wisconsin or in an imaginary landscape, the quilts are always deeply personal. 
 
Rumi O’Brien grew up in Tokyo, Japan, the daughter of seminal manga (comic book) artist Katsuji Matsumoto. Later, she moved to the United States to train as a watercolorist. For the past 50 years she has lived in Madison, where, several decades ago, she also began making quilts."

— Text from the website of the International Quilt Museum, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Multi-talented artist Rumi O'Brien will be at the Middleton Public Library Thursday evening, Nov. 14th, with her biographer Bobbie Malone. The two will be talking about Rumi's work and Bobbie's book that showcases O'Brien's quilts, paintings and paper creations. This is the first book devoted to O'Brien and you will be able to purchase a copy at the event. You must sign up in advance. 

O'Brien's work is currently on display at the International Quilt Museum University of Nebraska-Lincoln until April 2020.

Note: I am friends with both the artist and the author and own work by Rumi O'Brien, some of which is in the book. My husband also took the photos that illustrate the book. I am a big fan of both women (and the photographer!) and am looking forward to an entertaining and informative evening. Those of us who know Rumi Obrien's work have been waiting for this book for a long time.

I received no remuneration for this post nor was I asked to write it. 

Textile Symposium next month!

 

COLLECTORS SYMPOSIUM

“A Collection that counts”:

The History, Practice, and Future of Textile Collecting

Why do people collect textiles? How do they collect them? And what does it mean to ‘collect’? Join us to explore these questions and more during a symposium hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Design and Material Culture in the School of Human Ecology in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection.

The symposium will explore:

• the history of textile collecting, especially as an arena for women’s collecting;
• the varied motivations of contemporary textile collectors;
• practical aspects of collection care and display;
• the dissemination of textile collections, through exhibitions, events, or inheritance;
• the future of collecting, for example as a digital rather than material practice.

When: Saturday April 6 2019

• Registration opens at 8:30 am
• Keynote speaker at 9:00 am

Where: Nancy Nicholas Hall, School of Human Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison

. . .

I've already signed up! It sound like it should be informative as well as fun. The first weekend in April is still too early to do much work in the garden, so I am indulging my other passion: textiles. I just finished reading "Vintage," one of the textile-themed novels by Madison author, Susan Gloss, who will be the introductory speaker at this event.

The Ruth Davis Design Gallery and the new Lynn Mecklenburg Textile Gallery both have wonderful exhibits that I've seen once and am looking forward to taking in again while I'm there for the Symposium. Hope to see you there. 

Details about the event, including the other presentations can be found here.

Fiber Friday: Helen Louis Allen Textile Collection 50th Anniversary Celebration

 

One of A Kind Ahead of Her Time:
The Legacy of Helen Louise Allen

January 27 – April 18, 2019

Opening Reception: January 27th, 1 – 3 pm
Ribbon cutting and remarks at 1:30 pm

Lynn Mecklenburg Textile Gallery

School of Human Ecology, UW-Madison

Guest curated by Lynn K. Mecklenburg, the inaugural exhibition of the textile gallery showcases collection pieces representing the travels of Professor Helen Louise Allen (1902-1968).

Allen had a lifelong passion for handwork and the creative crafts. In 2019, she would thrive in society’s revitalization of the artisanal, the handmade, and the original. One of A Kind Ahead of Her Time invites gallery goers to consider the woman, the collector, and the educator who looked at textiles as carriers of human culture, a thought that remains relevant in today’s diverse and globalized world.

The exhibition is on view in conjunction with the Ruth Davis Design Gallery show from Applique to Zardozi: An Anniversary Sampler.

About the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection: Over the past half century, the collection has grown from an original 4,000-piece gift to more than 13,000 objects that have inspired and informed thousands of students, researchers, historians, and textile aficionados. The new Lynn Mecklenburg Textile Gallery is a permanent space dedicated to year-round displays of the collection.

Editor's note: I am a boardmember of the Friends of HLATC and am a big fan of textiles and the collection. I am posting this information because of that interest and not because I received any remuneration. The text is taken directly from the collection's website. If you have an interest in textile design, I suggest you "like" the Design Gallery's Facebook page which posts about textiles just enough to whet your appetite without overwhelming other FB posts. I love to see what they have discovered that's new, old, from here or there. 

Fiber Friday

One more from my sister-in-law. This is a view of one wall of her workroom, sewing space, art studio. The top of a wooden chest serves to display assorted treasures. On the wall above, three adjacent cork boards corral memories, souvenirs and inspiration. The room also contains a work table and shelving that holds all her supplies. 

This leather tray holds her many pincushions and thimbles. 

The bowl is filled with felt and fabric balls. She bound up all of her scraps of Japanese indigo fabrics into the ball on the right side of the container. The fabric strips are held in place with red thread.

While she doesn't have a large workroom, for me it has the perfect proportion of work space to inspirational space. What more does one need in order to create?

Fiber Friday: Hmong textiles

There's a beautiful and moving display of Hmong textiles including a number of large story quilts on exhibit at Blue Bar Quilts on Madison's west side. Some works are for sale as a fund-raiser for Kajsiab House and the local Cambodian Temple. Journey Mental Health Center announced in August it was closing Kajsiab House after 18 years of operation. Currently Madison City Council has covered the funding for the rest of the year. In the meantime, members of the Hmong and larger Madison community are looking for solutions to the funding cut.

Kajsiab House serves over 150 members of the Madison Hmong community, including refugees and veterans who fought for the U.S. in the Vietnam War. Through Kajsiab House, community members can access wrap-around services like English classes, meals and community discussions in addition to culturally sensitive mental health counselling and therapy.

These are a few of the pieces I saw when I was shopping at Blue Bar earlier this week.

Story quilts are among the most well-known of Hmong textile arts. Sometimes they include text like this one.

They are usually brightly embroidered awash with figures, domestic and agricultural landscapes as well as glimpses of the larger, historical context of this group's experiences during war in Southeast Asia. 

The Mekong River wends its way through this quilt.

The information for this story was taken from Madison Newspapers website.

Fiber Friday

Felted art, ranging from Christmas ornaments and mittens to rugs, historically has been the provenance of artisans in central Europe and central Asia. Among the more well known objects in this genre are wool felt Shyrdak rugs from Kyrgyztan. That ancient tradition is turned on its head in “Reliquary,” the work of Chicago-based artist William J. O'Brien currently on exhibit at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art.

 What look at first glance like large paintings or prints, turn out to be felted creations on closer examination. Red and black or blue and black felt motifs are stitched onto white grounds in an exuberant style reminiscent of outsider artists. One of the main objects is a tent big enough to walk through that is riotously painted in grays and black. Standing guard at the entrance are a pair of ceramic figures whose “crawling” glaze mimics beadwork.  “Reliquary” is installed throughout the first floor of MMoCA and will be on display until Nov. 11.

Both images: MMoCA

IVOM: Home and away

I see so many floral arrangements in print and online where the designer notes that many of the flowers or pods or branches used in the bouquet were "foraged." Living in a state with a lot of agriculture, "forage" is most commonly used here as a noun meaning food for livestock. If someone is "foraging" then they are typically looking for food. But all these hip young bloggers and floristas mean they found the material for their creations in the wild. I am always curious about where they actually go looking since it is illegal to remove natural material from public parks or gardens and the same goes for private property.

On the other hand, I did a little urban foraging over the weekend when I was at a bookstore in a mini-mall that's lost its main tenant. As a result the parking lot is almost entirely empty and the plantings are a mass of weeds and wildlings. Things were suffering from reflected heat and lack of attention. Since it was a public parking lot but unattended and barely used, I decided it was ripe for the kind of foraging I keep reading about. So I cut a bunch of goldenrod and asters, brought them home and put them in my largest wood fired stoneware pitcher. 

From my garden I cut flowering stems of an assertive pond plant — Penthorum seloides aka star fruit — that currently needs some stern attention before it takes over. Though commonly known as "star fruit," I've seen its branches described as "upside down turkey's feet" which seems pretty accurate to me. 

The third member of this trio has foliage from Aralia cordata 'Sun King' which is begin to turn yellow with a stem of pods from the same plant, along with a stem of Goldenrod that is past its prime.

All three pitchers are by local potter Mark Skudlarek of Cambridge Woodfired Pottery. The two smaller ones were bought as a pair that we thought would complement the big pitcher. The next three images are closeups of the patterns on each pitcher. 

When I pulled out these three pitchers from our basement pottery stash, I decided to change the entire table top. The fabric is African mud cloth, if I remember correctly. And the lamp is Japanese. American art and craft paired with African and Asian items is pretty much the design motif everywhere in our house. 

To see what other gardeners have put in a vase this Monday, visit Cathy at Rambling in the Garden. She is the host of the long-running meme that has become the favorite way to start the week for many of us gardeners around the world. 

Fiber Friday: A treat for the seamstress

As part of my process of turning our former guest room into a studio, I've been making space on the bookshelves in there for art and fiber supplies. This week I dropped off three grocery bags stuffed with gardening books to Olbrich Botanical Gardens. They'll determine which of them to add to their collection and which to put out at their plant sale in May. I gained three empty shelves that I quickly filled with supplies stashed hither and you around the house.

But I left room for a new sewing item that I recently found at a local antiques mall. Despite trying to downsize and not bring in a lot of new items, sometimes one just can't resist an unexpected find. This is a small folk/tramp art sewing box, date unknown. It's not large, only abut 9 inches in all dimensions.

You can see from these first two photos that the maker did not quite get the middle section figured out and put together as neatly as the other parts. But that's the charm of old unusual items like this: They exhibit the hand of the maker. And this maker showed her (or his) clever hand in a design that lets 8 different strands of thread neatly unspool through the white rings. 

The top section is a box whose lid lifts off revealing 8 nails that hold short spools of thread. The middle and bottom sections are drawers that still held old sewing supplies, including a little travel kit from "Grant's Golden West" in Hobbs, N.M. The container also advertises some brand of medicine called Calvert which the print says "tastes better" and suggests you switch. So maybe it originally held pills and someone later added tiny sewing supplies. 

I thought I would add a few of my own quirky sewing supplies like this old package of gold eye needles and black enameled entomology pins "for extra fine fabrics." 

Though the stuffing inside the pincushion on the top of the box has lost its oomph, I decided to leave it alone so that the entire creation is intact. Though the whole box is in usable condition, I have a strong suspicion that I will give it pride of place more like a tiny sculpture than a tool.

Wordless Wednesday

Silk embroidery, 18th C.