Friday, July 10, 2020

Reading and viewing, quilts and other things

Lots of lovely and useful things to look at in these links about sewing, textiles and quilts ...




Hand Sewing Needle Size Guide - Type, Length
John James Needles (UK)
A comprehensive guide to hand sewing needles, free to download, images are at actual size when printed at A4. 



Kimono: Kyoto to catwalk at the V and A, in pictures
Zoe Paskett, The Standard, 21 May 2020
The V and A museum is giving viewers a second chance to see its acclaimed exhibition all about the history of kimonos. 
Kimono: Kyoto to Catwalk opened at the end of February but had to close just two weeks later due to the lockdown. 
The museum has now released a series of five videos taking viewers on a 30-minute behind-the-scenes tour of the exhibition, led by curator Anna Jackson ...
Paul Nero, Radio Exe (UK) 25 May 2020
The Devon County Show may have been cancelled this year, but its Guinness World Record attempt for a length of knitted bunting has knocked the socks off previous record holders. In fact, it has almost doubled the previous puny length held by Upton House of 31,119 flags, measuring 7.5km in length ...

Log Cabin, Pineapple variation
Anna Hazel Burmeister
Circa 1894, Waukesha, Wisconsin
Jill Kaufman,  New England Print Radio, 29 May 2020 
... Since quilting is a tactile medium, Tarr said, it's hard to do on a video chat — though some quilting groups are managing to gather. While sewing may be solitary, people do get together to do it. 
“There is a community of quilters that's really missing each other right now,” she said ...

Gees Bend Quiltmakers
Souls Grown Deep
... Gee’s Bend quilts carry forward an old and proud tradition of textiles made for home and family. They represent only a part of the rich body of African American quilts. But they are in a league by themselves. Few other places can boast the extent of Gee’s Bend’s artistic achievement, the result of both geographical isolation and an unusual degree of cultural continuity. In few places elsewhere have works been found by three and sometimes four generations of women in the same family, or works that bear witness to visual conversations among community quilting groups and lineages. Gee’s Bend’s art also stands out for its flair—quilts composed boldly and improvisationally, in geometries that transform recycled work clothes and dresses, feed sacks, and fabric remnants ...

Exquisite 2300-Year-Old Scythian Woman’s Boot Preserved in the Frozen Ground of the Altai Mountains
Open Culture, 22 June 2020
Nomads do not leave many traces, but when the Scythians buried their dead they took care to equip the corpse with the essentials they thought they needed for the perpetual rides of the afterlife.

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