This is a follow-up to an earlier post on the way digital technology and textile printing is fueling a wave of experimentation in textile design. I just heard from Melanie Bowles, a lecturer at the Chelsea School of Art in London, who produces a very interesting blog called makeitdigitaltextiles. She has recently co-authored a book on this topic as well, Digital Textile Design. The Make It Digital blog is a very useful resource for designers or anyone interested in textile or other digital design. The beautiful book shown above is not Bowles’ book, but a digital design resource book called Kapitza which I discovered on Bowles’ blog. “Each geometric pattern is built from ‘font shapes.’ The book comes with a CD of downloadable fonts so you can create endless pattern yourself.” Extremely useful! The blog also has an interesting post on Alexander McQueen, but most of the designers Bowles mentions were new to me. For example Glory Scarves out of Australia, see below, who use algorithmic design to automate the production of one-of-a-kind prints:

Fabulous digitally printed scarves from Australia show the changing look of printed textiles using a digital medium. Each scarf is created by entering an individual equation into a computer – creating a mathematically valid fractal – each scarf is therefore unique.

Finally, Bowles likes geometric and experimental patterns, and her blog is free from the more kitchen-y, crafty, neo-granny textile patterns that are proliferating in North America via the new digital printing services. It’s great that digital printing democratizes textile design and makes it affordable, but for me many of the results are disappointing, on this continent anyway. Bowles’ blog is not like that. Below is one of her own textile designs, a conflation of traditional Japanese shibori – which has always had a geometric component – and more mathematical design methods. Very well thought out and beautifully executed.

My recent work ‘Digital Shibori’ explores the parallels between traditional craft processes and digital technology and I have been looking at the ancient craft of Shibori which uses the techniques of stitching, knotting and folding fabric which is then dyed to achieve the organic patterning that it creates. I have translated these effects in Adobe Illustrator by manipulating graphic geometrics and experimenting with light effects, blends and folded pattern to create the essence of this traditional craft… the designs have been finally digitally printed onto organza and cottons to maintain the feeling of light.

This textile sample was given to me by Andy McDonald, a researcher within the Centre for Advanced Textiles at the Glasgow School of Art. He was at the end of a speaking tour in N. America and had with him this small sample of fabric designed by celebrated Glasgow designers Timorous Beasties. It’s digitally printed, but digital processes have become so advanced that it is becoming very hard to tell digitally printed fabric apart from fabric printed the traditional way. I played with this sample until Andy finally gave it to me. The Centre for Advanced Textiles seems quite far ahead of what we’re doing in North America, both in terms of textile quality and design policy. Through the combination of academic research and commercial services, CAT provides an important link between education and industry and receives substantial R&D support from a forward-thinking, relatively design-industry-friendly state. From the standpoint of the small, independent designer, digital printing is extremely liberating. For example, in its textile printing bureau CAT Digital has a selection of over 30 natural fabrics that can be printed with your design (from a digital file), and because there’s minimal set up, they will print as little as 50cm (20 inches) for you. Perhaps only designers who use textiles will understand how completely thrilling and revolutionary this is – we can design our own patterns! Among other things this is going to mean a degree of democratization of textile design and the encouragement of smaller local manufacturing. You probably can’t tell from the scan above, but the quality, tooth, weight and drape of the cotton that CAT’s printing system can accommodate is superior to much of what’s available in digital printing in North America right now, and they can print on many different fibres – heavy linen, wool, silk. And you can get fine control over colours; if you look closely in the scan above you can see the subtle grey-on-cream pattern in the background. It’s surprisingly well done, even when compared to traditional printing. And yet it’s not prohibitively more expensive than what most N. American printers are doing on thinner, cheaper cotton. With luck this will change soon, and it seems that First2Print in New York is quickly catching up. It isn’t an economy of scale problem, after all, considering we’re a continent of nearly 350 million. Still, the modern textile industry was born in Scotland, England and Holland, and Europe has long been a fussy, demanding, educated textile market, so maybe it’s not surprising Glasgow has a head start in terms of both innovation and quality. See also CAT’s classic textiles line – classictextiles.com; two samples are below.

If you’re a textile nerd, you may be interested in an interesting article by CAT’s original director on the local economic benefits of digital textile printing, and an interesting mention of a project to reproduce and archive rare antique designs in small print runs. See Scottish Heritage Textiles Online:

“Textile printing in Scotland was a major industry in the 19th century but went into a steady decline after the First World War, with the last major factory closing in 1960. However the advent of this new digital technology, which is ecologically sound, an important factor in an industry with a poor environmental record, as well as labour and space efficient, creates the opportunity to stop the migration of production to the Far East and mount a revival.”

The bottom photo shows a functioning scarecrows made of indigo-dyed hemp. The original book caption reads “The bold design of this piece of shibori-dyed hemp by Seizo Ishikawa, a farmer, seems at home working as a scarecrow by a newly harvested rice field.” The birds in Japan must have been accustomed to seeing farmers in real Japanese indigo yukatas, waving their arms. In the top photo, however, the proximity to the house suggests mainly the traditional Japanese method of drying kimono, yukata and other garments, but it probably conveniently doubled as a scarecrow. The target design is interesting, perhaps suggesting part of an eye? From the excellent book Japan Country Living: Spirit, Tradition, Style by Amy Sylvester Katoh, photographs by Shin Kimura, Charles E. Tuttle Company, Rutland, Vermont and Tokyo, Japan, 1993. Kimura’s work has also appeared in Met Home and Paris Vogue. Also see their excellent book Japan: The Art of Living.

The so-called “afghan blanket” invariably ends its life at Value Village. It’s hard to know which is more disturbing: the synthetic quality of the object itself, or the fact that it is still, amazingly, given everything that has happened over the last fifteen and more years, called an “afghan.” A search online to discover the origins of this craft object immediately turned up “The All American Denim Stripes Afghan.” Good grief. I propose these be called “americans” from now on. As it turns out, the “afghan” is a part of a distinctly American craft history. Oddly, even Wikipedia’s entry doesn’t bother to make mention of why its name refers to Afghanistan, but I learned elsewhere that “the afghan” was originally a thrifty item made from leftover ends of wool, and because it was colourful it was named after Afghan carpets in what was obviously an act of deep wishful thinking. It may be cruel to say, but I’m not sure that Afghanistan, where thriftiness has historically been at least as well known, has ever created an object this low in artistic merit. As for North America, of all the beautiful things that could be made with the intense artisanal energies of a continent of dedicated women, why these synthetic, flammable, artistically toxic accidents of petroleum-based colour and pattern? What’s worse about these things is that there is truly no way to re-use or recycle them. I know, because in our studio we decided to see if we could resurrect them after seeing literally thousands of these things during years of sourcing vintage textiles at rag houses. We came up with nothing. This object stubbornly resists any attempt to resuscitate it, even if you’re using the “so bad it’s good” argument. The families for which these were made seem invariably give them away, where they travel from thrift shop to rag house to the dump where they stubbornly refuse to decompose. The photo above was taken recently in Value Village and it represents about 1/4 of the afghans for sale there that day. Below are some Afghani textiles – suzanis and rugs made to last many lifetimes. Suzanis are blankets embroidered and appliqued by Afghani women that function both as quilts and wall decoration. In North America it would be so nice to see an end to “afghans” made from these garish synthetic fibres, and to see fewer painstakingly-made but badly-conceived objects so steadily thrown away. Why does so much North American craft seem so artistically impoverished, compared to craft from other parts of the world? The answer is probably obvious, lying in our settler history and loss of craft tradition. Gee’s Bend and Amish Quilts are an exception, but an exception that proves the rule. See these war rugs made by Afghan men who aren’t even traditional rug-makers but rather just men who had nothing else to do while waiting in refugee camps.

The textile company Anek Taanka, which means “infinite stitches,” was founded by Indian textile designer Varsha Sharma. She has said that “my challenge is to create pieces of textile that could inspire spaces to be designed around them rather than the other way around.” That’s a bold ambition but this pillow makes you think she could actually do it. Found on Indian by Design.

Fantastic 1970s geometric supergraphic textile by German designer Elsbeth Kupferoth, who deserves to be much better known. Interesting short essay on her work and more photos at The Textile Blog. Her unusual colour schemes make these designs much less dated than the more common 70s combinations.