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.”

Above is an example of the Cowichan sweater, photo courtesy Cowichan Tribes. The Cowichan tribes are part of the coastal Salish Nation, long renowned for their fine weaving, so it’s not surprising the Cowichan people quickly adapted their own designs to the knitting they learned from white settlers. The Cowichan sweater is unique in that it has a collar and was traditionally knit all in one piece, and while nowadays the sweaters sometimes have a heavy metal zipper, they’re otherwise unchanged. Many sweaters have traditional Salish motifs on front and back, often killer whale, salmon, eagles or deer. I grew up with one of these – a proper pullover one with no seams – and many British Columbians would have had a similar one. The wool is not dyed – darker sheep produce the dark brown and grey wool for the designs. Natural lanolin is left in the wool so that the sweaters shed water in the wet BC climate. These sweaters show up in popular culture all the time, though most of them are cheap knockoffs – to a British Columbian eye, the ones in The Big Lebowski and Starsky and Hutch are obvious fakes. Updated designs are fine, but it’s the quality and weight of the wool that counts; the fibres should be natural in colour, not dyed; and banded arms with traditional Salish weaving patterns.

Since it’s one of the most iconic BC designs it seemed fitting that a custom-designed Cowichan sweater would be proposed for the Olympics, as part of the giant merchandising circus we’ve been subjected to here in BC for the past few years. Well-known Cowichan knitter Emily Sawyer-Smith, above, produced the Olympic design sweater you can see being presented below to BC’s premier Gordon Campbell, at left, and Jacques Rogges, IOC president, at right. This actually seemed like a great development but to the shock of many, and despite the fact that the well-organized Cowichan bands had assembled enough knitters to supply the Olympics with these sweaters, The Hudson’s Bay department store created controversy by claiming the Cowichan knitters’ output would be too small and instead having odd faux Cowichan sweaters made for their official line of 2010 Olympic clothing - in China. (Photo at bottom). However, despite that fact that the public considers The Bay’s sweater to be a “cowichan,” The Bay claims it is not – and in some ways it’s right. Many however still consider their design to be theft. More here about the conflict over trademark and cultural property, and you can also read about the meeting held between the Bay and the Cowichan band here. In the end, after threats of Olympic relay disruptions and a lot of media coverage, an accommodation was reached at the end of October – real Cowichan sweaters will be sold at two Olympic pavilions as well as at the Hudson’s Bay. But the story doesn’t end there for First Nations art at the Olympics, where many other imported art objects are being sold as “authentic aboriginal art” and are edging out true First Nations art. See that story here.

Above is the weird hybrid knockoff being sold at the Hudson’s Bay Company as an official 2010 Olympics souvenir. It clearly references the Cowichan sweater, but it has the look of those mass-produced curling sweaters (often with belts), and its wool is dyed, unlike the wool in an authentic Cowichan. Maroon is just wrong. While there is no completely standard design for these sweaters – they are after all a culturally hybrid product – the above knockoff seems poor on many levels, and as a British Columbian I’m a bit embarrassed that this is how the world is going to see our craft and design. What was the Hudson’s Bay Co. thinking? For successful innovations in Cowichan designs , Emily Sawyer-Smith’s Olympic rings design is great, and so is CBC broadcaster Grant Lawrence’s sweater, below. Further below is Canadian WWII officer Cecil Merritt in a Cowichan sweater sent to him by relatives in Vancouver – he’s photographed here in a Nazi prisoner of war camp along with fellow officers.

For more discussion on the sweater and its appropriation, see KnowBC and UBCWiki. Authentic Cowichan sweaters can be found at places like Authentic Cowichan Indian Knits, 424 W. 3rd St, North Vancouver, 604-988-4735, or online from individual makers, like this. Below is a somewhat odd pair of sweaters, given the fraught historical relationship of the church to First Nations (photo from Wikipedia by Marg Miekle):

This Japanese boro (futon cover) was made in the 19th century by recycling remnants of indigo dyed cotton and joining them together. It’s so well-made that it’s still in perfect condition. There is really no printed or woven substitute for this kind of work, which at this point in history, when handmade textile methods are rapidly vanishing, is really hard not to fetishize. People don’t seem to have time for mending anymore. On average North Americans throw away  a staggering 68 pounds of textiles a year each, which in Canada alone, with a population of approx 30 million people, amounts to 2,040,000,000 pounds. Yes, that’s 2 billion 40 million pounds of discarded textiles – in one year. And each year, we buy another 68 pounds. Textiles are some of the most toxic products to produce, and most of them travel great, wasteful distances to reach us. Some discarded textiles do get recycled – usually overseas in Asia, India and sometimes Africa, which means they take yet another trip. We might as well start mending again. Look how beautiful it is. Photos of this many-times-mended boro via 1st Dibs. Close-up detail:

The photos of Japanese mending and patches, below, are from Amy Sylvester Katoh’s book Japanese Country Living. She comments that “[t]he miraculous thing is that so many such pieces are extant today, carefully stored away for decades by the families that made and used them.” More photos and pages from the book can be found in the Japan Flickr set here. Immediately below: patched futon on beds and ragweave rug in a restored Japanese farmhouse; patched farmer’s jacket.

Below is the method of mending stitchery known as sashiko. It’s a form of mending which, by traveling across the warp or weft or often both, reinforces the textile and mimics weaving.

Probably everyone and his/her dog has seen this NYC loft apartment by now, and possibly also blogged about it, but this is one of those places that is so hypnotizing I can’t stop looking at it. It’s on the top floor of a former industrial building on Broadway in NYC and not surprisingly it belongs to an architect couple. It is filled with Jean Prouvé and Hans Wegner furniture among other beautiful things, but it’s the beautiful diamond-patterned Berber rug and the striped pillows that make it. There’s something about these minimalist, monochomatic stripes and geometries that produce a mesmerized quasi-autistic trance, while at the same time they are also pleasingly reminiscent of the traditional striped textiles of both Sweden and Greece. Modernism’s long-standing relationship with simple agrarian-based weaving is not surprising. Without the wood and textiles this would just be another cool – even cold – white loft.

Via OWI.

The photo above shows the central living area of a rural farmhouse on the border of Tochigi and Ibaraki prefectures. The house was restored by Kenji Tsuchisawa who bought it as a rundown heap when he was only 20, after seeing a photograph of a traditional Japanese farmhouse on a Tokyo magazine cover. He bought the house before realizing it was situated just one village away from the house in the magazine. Many Japanese traditional farmhouses have now been restored and modernized, but the layout of these houses is so clever in terms of use of space and comfort that when they are updated, the original layout is often retained. It’s a house model being studied by North American and European architects aiming to produce smaller but more functional houses. Traditional Japanese houses are not large, but they seem larger than they are thanks to their well-thought-out layout, and their serene, warm version of minimalism makes them comfortable and functional. The use of natural materials and repeated colours makes the rooms feel balanced, and so does the fact that most objects have a real function. Decorative elements exist, but not to excess. When they are modernized, the main alteration is usually the replacement of the original exterior doors and windows, and trading the sliding shoji screen doors and windows for more sturdily framed glass doors, windows and skylights to let in more light and keep out the weather.

Both photos above show the traditional indoor fire pit known as an irori, which sometimes sits on a raised seating platform, though in the photo above the irori has been traded for a more efficient (and safer) wood stove. The beautiful half-frosting on the glass screen doors in the photo above provides some privacy from the fairly public courtyard for people seated inside. Photos are from a book I think is really worth buying: 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.

Above is a checkerboard textile of indigo-dyed hemp by Hiroyuki Shindo, on the verandah of his thatched house. It provides privacy (it appears opaque from outside, see here) and yet admits light and the view. Below, a functional modern kitchen produced by making only minor changes to the original.

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.