.

The North Face Purple Label presents their new Harris Tweed collection. The collection offer a down jacket and a down vest, each in three Harris Tweed colorways.

This Japan-only collection of more experimental and fashion forward pieces keeps the function aspect but is a tad less technically inclined then its mainline production. The usage of patterns and fabrics has the brand looking more design friendly than its mountaineering American brother and its Japan-only exclusivity makes getting your hands on the stuff as hard on the pocket as its absence is on our hearts.

Via.

The swinging monkey

The eye-catching bold designs is the backbone of a veteran handloom designer who has turned her back to mechanisations to embrace labour-intensive process to churn out colourful tapestries, table mats and table cloths.

“What inspires me? Everything around me,” laughs Marie Gnanaraj, artist and principle designer behind the “Barefoot” brand that has carved a niche making handloom fabrics, toys and clothes since 1964.

The petite-Gnanaraj, 59, initially juggled her speech and drama career with making beautiful handmade paper flowers, leaves and twigs for special occasions.

She briefly moonlighted as an audit trainee, before landing a job as a trainee designer at Barefoot in 1975.

“I was sent by the audit firm to help keep books at Barefoot,” chuckles Gnanaraj as she recalls her brush with Barefoot, a firm that has successfully built up a lucrative niche market among overseas clients.

“My background in decorating, flower making I think, gave me the courage to apply for the post. And I literally learnt on the weaving loom first under Ann Cock (fabric designer) and later Barbra Sansoni,” she said.

Using over 60 colours, Barefoot’s cotton and silk fabrics use geometric designs to give a distinct identity to their sarees, sarongs, shawls, rugs, mats, tapestries and furnishings.

Gnanaraj ventured further, creating works of art using yarn, rope, twigs, colourful bobbins, electrical wires and even permanent marker pens, to weave mats, tapestries and rugs.

“In Barefoot, we are taught that everything must look nice,” she says.

“We avoid black, because Barbra says we shouldn’t put black on the table. People should feel like eating at the table. So we use food colours like bright greens, oranges, purple, pinks, yellows for table linen,” she said.

Pastel colours are also avoided as it reminds users of babies excrement.

The contrasting colours are stunning, allowing the different textures of fabric to be used as a table top, a tapestry, a curtain or even a wrap-around sarong.

Under her own label “Marie”, Gnanaraj’s artistic style has developed to textured woven panels and table mats that are mixed with yarn and choir.

Today the tapestries — some done under her own label — add a touch of class to homes, offices and top resorts in Sri Lanka.

Sansoni, the designer, artist, writer and the backbone of the “Barefoot” label, once described Gnanaraj’s creativity as an artist who builds her work using colourful dyed threads, yarns of silk or coarse plant fibre.

“Her pieces come off the wall, travel over flat surfaces or hang, swinging in space like an indoor rainforest,” said Sansoni.

Having showcased her work in over dozen solo or group exhibitions, Gnanaraj’s tapestries are on public display to coincide with the Sri Lanka Design festival that starts on November 27.

Title “Dream Weaver”, she uses “knots” to illustrate her contemporary art.

“The weavers’ knot is the first step to learn the art of weaving. A weaver keeps joining the threads, and the knot becomes the solution for broken threads,” she explains while showing Colombo Spirit around her studio.

Weaving has also became the center of her life, with the wooden looms, bales of colourful yarns, threads and bobbins occupy a pride of place in her home, amidst medals for winning Latin dance competitions with her husband, Mano.

Gnanaraj’s family has grown up around her artistic creations. The creativity streak runs through her three children, who dabble in theatre, music and hand craft despite individual careers spanning engineering, law and fashion design.

Hailing from an artistic family, her mother used to illustrate nature using oil and water colours, while her aunts and siblings are deft at needlework, sugar craft, handmade cards and table decor.

“My career has taken many different paths, but the time I spend creating with yarns is the most rewarding experience.”

You now have just a few days left to see the Fashion and Textile Museum’s small free exhibition of textiles designed by Jacqueline Groag, the most influential textile designer in Britain post World War II.

During the 1920s and 1930s she designed for Wiener Werkstätte in Vienna as well as for Parisian fashion houses including Chanel, Lanvin, Worth, Schiaparelli and Paul Poiret. She and her husband fled Vienna before World War II and were welcomed in Britain by the design fraternity, so that during the 1940s she was the leading designer of textiles in Britain. In 1951 her textiles and wallpapers were shown at the Festival of Britain and her patterns became influential internationally.

During the 1950s and 1960s she had many clients in the US including Associated American Artists and for Hallmark Cards. Later in this period she also worked with Sir Misha Black at the Design Research Unit and designed interiors for boats, planes and trains, and in the mid-1970s she created a distinct moquette for London Transport buses and tube trains. In 1984 she became a Royal Designer for Industry, the ultimate accolade for a British designer.

'Puppet Ballet' by Jacqueline Groag

You can see a selection of her designs in the display, including raw fabricpatterns, dresses and wallpapers. The bright designs feature pattern as different as views through open windows of people’s homes, geometric patterns, and birds and floral patterns. I liked ‘Puppet Ballet’.

On display until 10 December. More information at www.ftmlondon.org

International trade fair for home and contract textiles.
Held over four days in January, it has been the sector’s first trade fair of the year for decades and is the foremost platform for manufacturers, the trade and designers from all over the world.
Exhibitors from around 60 countries will present their products to international trade visitors. The product show will be accompanied by high-grade special shows and workshops aimed at both visitors and exhibitors.

January 13 – 16, 2010
Frankfurt, Germany

Heimtextil

Do you need trade fair support ? We can help:

TransDomo,LLC
Klaus Westerwelle
8 Briarpark Drive
Greer, SC 29651
Phone: 864.908.0690
Email: info@transdomo.com
Transdomo
Westerwelle

This structure is made up of thousands of individual Murano glass pieces in black, white and shades of grey that link together to form what appears to be an oversized knitted fabric, weighing over 6 tonnes.

Carapace dress £258

Epiphany | Autumn Winter 2009

stunning shapes, redolent with romance, unexpected knits, rich colours and winter softness ethically made in the UK from British wool.

Roses grow out of winter dresses, while dramatic ruching creates warmth and stylish silhouettes. Filmy layers of open knits add glamour with chunky scarves for substance.

Our drained down dusk palette is warm and deep, perfect colours for winter nights.

Frieldhurst Edgeway

Makepiece is not just a designer label – it’s part of a landscape, which has for hundreds of years been shaped by the wool industry, from the dry-stone walled pastures to the packhorse tracks across the moors which took wool from farm to market.

They take natural yarns, raised sustainably, spin them as locally as possible, knit in our community, using the minimum chemical processes possible to produce a finished product that can be treasured for years. It’s part of a story which knits a community with a landscape.

Carapace Gauntlets £47

Like you, Makepiece want beautiful clothes and…

HUMAN RIGHTS…  they know they can trust their farmers and the mills where we live to produce yarn to a very high standard – and to look after the people involved in production.

ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY… they’ve chosen to use wool and mohair from British farms and their own sheep because they know how the land is farmed, and fibres such as hemp, bamboo and tencel because they can easily be grown sustainably.

FEWER CHEMICALS…  each collection contains undyed and naturally dyed clothes along with some azo-free dye colourways dyed to european environmental controls.

A SMALL CARBON FOOTPRINT… they want their clothes to travel very few road miles before they’re worn so all our spinning, dyeing and manufacturing is done in the UK.

NO LANDFILL… they design their clothes to last – but when they’ve finally been worn to shreds, they can be composted.

Saltway Shawl £36

‘If you think of what you’re wearing and you find it’s been round the world before you put it on for the first time, was manufactured out of cotton dripping with pesticides or sewn by people in shoddy conditions, it suddenly doesn’t feel half as glamourous.

Style is about expressing who we are. Most of us don’t think of ourselves as cheap and shoddy but if we’re not careful that’s what our clothes say about us.’ Nicola Sherlock, Makepiece designer.

Carapace Scarf £33

Makepiece was founded in 2004 by Nicola Sherlock and Beate Kubitz to produce beautiful clothing that is sustainable, low-impact and eco-friendly.

Briar Rose Shrug £120

Heart Gallery has a large selection of Makepiece A/W 09 now in stock so we look forward to seeing you down in Hebden Bridge soon xXx

Rose Dress

Foxglove Dress and Carapace Ruff

Hello and Thank You for visiting the Barkha textiles blog! Barkha Textiles is a custom textile development and sourcing business run by Atlanta resident Barkha Malik. All fabrics we work with are eco-friendly and guaranteed fair labor. We started this blog to discuss and dissect current textile related eco-issues and give our customers a closer look on the types of fabrics we source and how we find them.

Barkha began working in the textile industry in 1991, shortly after relocating to the U.S. with her husband from Delhi, India. A lover and collector of all handmade textiles, she has been working with artisans and weavers in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh for many years to develop custom textiles for use in domestic markets. Her main focus these days is to expand and market her collection of sustainable textiles. One of her key goals is to promote and preserve some of the dying traditional art forms in these developing countries by giving these co-ops and villages a marketing path into the vast American market!

Barkha has made personal visits to most of the manufacturers she sources from, to personally guarantee that everything we stock adheres to both eco-friendly and fair labor guidelines. The others are inspected by liaison offices in the respective countries. The manufacturing processes used are as green as possible to have a low impact on their surrounding ecosystems. Barkha only sources from organizations that are sweat-shop free and treat their workers fairly. The sales of these fabrics directly benefit the workers themselves and not exploitive mega corporations.

Family co-op in Nepal

Yes, im sure you’ve seen it already, but I can’t resist putting some details of the Alexander Mc Queen SS10 show in the blog AMAZZZZZZING!

How did that collection happen?! A.M.azing…. The digital print work on this collection alone blows my mind… WOOP!WOOP!

full show at style.com amongst others >>>>

HX

(photos thanks to style.com -DONT SUE ME!)

These are the cutest, sweetest accesories I’ve ever seen! haciendo el indio comes to life thanks to Cristina Serrano.

haciendo el indio creates things for children, things made to endure, to become childhood partners, timeless objects and characters that tell wonderfull stories in the universal language of children. 

 haciendo el indio makes lovable products full of poetry and fun: felt and linen dolls, unique wall art, beautiful printed cotton accessories, illustrations, small jewels, memorable stationary…. a range of objects manufactured in Europe with great care and high quality materials.

Cristina Serrano, illustrator and designer, grew up in different countries shifting between the city and the countryside. As a child she looked for snails, climbed trees and had fun drawing and inventing stories.

Cristina studied in Central St. Martins School of Design and Parsons School of Art & Design and worked for large communication, decoration and entertainment companies. One day she changed the big city for a spot near the Mediterranean where she remembered with the help of her children the language of kids and invented a new story: haciendo el indio.

I should’ve done more research prior to naming this blog “Frugal Fashionista” b/c I just saw a pretty well known blog titled this same name… hmmmmmmm… if you see changes, you’ll know why now!

Sooo fall quarter of my last year at UCD really got me thinking about life after college… I’m majoring in Communication & Psychology with a minor in Textiles. I need more motivation to get my butt out there and get an internship or something. I know I’m telling myself I really want to be a buyer, but lately I feel like there’s so much competition nowadays. It just feels like so many people are into fashion now. This is some tough business I need to sort out soon!

Rachel Bilson

I have a total girl crush on Rachel Bilson ever since she appeared on The OC! (& yes, I admit to have watched The OC as well as owning the first season on DVD! lol)

Sandy

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Harris Tweed Hebrides have launched a rather nice new website replete with oodles of info and exclusive online collections.

It’s been a good year for Harris Tweed Hebrides and I’ve been fortunate to work with them on an interiors project this year, bring the tweed to a restored 110 year old Glasgow pub.

Harris Tweed Hebrides, the award-winning company based at Shawbost on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis, now accounts for more than 90 per cent of Harris Tweed production.

They export to over 50 countries and their customers over the past year have included Alexander McQueen, Calvin Klein and Vivienne Westwood.

Harris Tweed Hebrides, which was founded only in late 2007, is generally credited with having revitalized the industry and taken the fabric into the front-line of 21st century fashion and design.

The company was named Textile Brand of the Year 2009 at the Vogue.COM Scottish Fashion Awards and given the major accolade for Outstanding Contribution at the 2009 Scottish Style Awards.

They use a range of more than 100 yarns which can be made up into thousands of patterns by their highly skilled workforce and represent generations of experience in this craft industry.

Truly, Harris Tweed Hebrides has brought a new twist to an old yarn.

View the new website and online collections via the link below.

www.harristweedhebrides.com

Sometimes when I see Daisy Lowe’s name appear up on my Twitter feeds I find it hard to justify why she’s there, other than simply to remind myself that she exists and hope there might be a picture involved.      

Completely and utterly gratuitous

I know about Black Cab Sessions.  They’ve put me on a few things over the past couple of years (check this as well it’s ace), although it’s been a while since I’ve checked in, but when Daisy tells me to check something out, I check it out*.      

I only know the name Holly Miranda because her band The Jealous Girlfriends won an iPod music comp at some point. That’s about where my knowledge ends. Pretty pathetic.      

Still. I’ll give them a proper look now. Better late than never hey.      

It’s a really beautiful cover. She’s got an incredible voice.      

Cheers Miss Lowe. All you need to do now is knock up some beautiful textiles like your Mum (I love her Mum) and you’re well on your way to my top 5.  You lucky cow.      

If anyone has a problem with me liking beautiful textiles then….well….nothing really…..fuck yourselves.      

That’s it.      

RnR      

*Not entirely true

Another fabric ornament, this time a Santa Claus Icicle Doll, made for the new WS Santa Claus challenge. Stamps used: Inkadinkado damask, Stampotique’s Jeepers and Turtle Press Alphabet. Glimmering Hope (below) is glimmering as well as an Icicle Doll on my tree.

 
Ein weiterer Stoffanhänger, dieses Mal ein Nikolaus Icicle Doll, gemacht für die neue MS-Nikolaus-Herausforderung. Verwendete Stempel: Inkadinkado Damask, Stampotique’s Jeepers und Turtle Press Alphabet. Glimmering Hope (unten) schimmert auch als Icicle Doll an meinem Baum.

Quite a fun and yummy  Santa Claus chocolate army spotted at my local Auchan supermarket! 
Schon eine lustige und leckere Nikolaus-Schoki-Armee, die ich im hiesigen Auchan-Supermarkt sehe!

Isn’t this a fun Santa Claus Mix?
Lustiger Nikolaus-Mix, oder?

“My strength is my confidence,” said Zubaida Nizam, an artisan with Ankur Kala in Kolkata, India. Nizam has worked with Ankur Kala for the past nine years, primarily creating the tie-dye scarves that are Ankur Kala’s specialty.

Nizam grew up in a conservative Muslim family in Kolkata. Her father was paralyzed and unable to work. Her mother struggled to raise Zubaida and her siblings almost singlehandedly, working in a plastics factory. When the children were small, she often brought work home.

Nizam received training from Ankur Kala in the art of scarf making. She learned the basic skills through a two-year junior level training, followed by a senior level training in which she learned about budgeting, costing, quality control and leadership. Nizam has also benefited from other holistic programs of Ankur Kala such as meditation and yoga, and through attending seminars and exhibitions.

Nizam stressed the importance of quality control. “It’s extremely important to concentrate, and make sure that the final product is perfect,” she said. As tie-dye is a laborious process requiring much skill, she has also learned the art of patience as she struggles to get the right colors and shades. In the midst of the monsoon season, she needs to wait long hours for the scarves to dry, so that the next color can be added. “This has taught me to be patient and persevering,” she said.

Coming from a poor family, and being the eldest, Nizam is extremely concerned about her young brother and sisters, wanting to ensure that they receive a good education. She is able to do this through her earnings from making scarves. Ultimately she hopes to teach batik and tie-dye to other poor women, so that they too can earn a good living.

Ankur Kala’s name means “a seedling of art.” The center provides self-employment to destitute women who are victims of exploitation, by helping them produce and sell tailored articles, batik and tie-dye handicrafts and food products. Both the tailoring and catering units are geared to the local market, while the textile unit sells products locally as well as abroad. Basic education like reading, writing, simple accounting and business skills are taught, so that after training the women can successfully run their own small-scale businesses. Ankur Kala also makes the women aware of the social problems women face, in the form of a theater where the women perform, and in discussions. Ankur Kala has also been reaching out to women in villages for the prevention of trafficking of vulnerable young girls. An Ankur Kala team has been networking with these women through existing organizations, to teach them skills such as tailoring and kitchen gardening. It is founder Annie Joseph’s dream that each of the women will live the values of Ankur Kala and sow fresh seeds of hope, integrity and inspiration among others.

Ankur Kala was started in 1982 by Annie Joseph, a social worker inspired by her work with Mother Theresa and with the Taizé community in France. She established Ankur Kala to help poor and destitute women become economically self-reliant and stand up for their rights with dignity.

Ten Thousand Villages purchases tie-dye textiles from Ankur Kala, and has purchased products from the group since 1990.

Tie-dyed cotton scarf, India, $34.00

Image of the chair I created as part of my final collection at university.

I was dontated the frame by Homes + Interiors, Troon www.homesandinteriors.co.uk and had it locally upholstered. The print was developed from a previous art work that I had produced and altered to make it suitable for this end use.

I created the print through CAD and printed each screen separation onto heavy duty cotton by hand after creating and mixing the pigment dyes. I printed a repeat of 4m to make more than enough for the upholsterer to use.

Below is the fabric on the print room table.

The chair is currently on sale through Homes + Interiors, retailing for £799.

These images are photographs I took and manipulated the colour to make look completely unrealistic. They were taken at a disused harbour on the west coast of Scotland close to where I live. These were the jumping off point for my final years work at university,  I wanted them to look as different to real life as possible. My whole concept reveloved around colour and abstractism so I was keen to change the images as much as possible in the first stage of research.

I still love the textures and depth to these images today.

We will be holding a Hat Knitting workshop this coming Saturday, December 5th, from 1-5pm. Our knitting teacher, Anne Marie, is amazingly talented…(see below for some of her knitting work — she will also be teaching our Mommy+Me knitting, as well as fashion knitting!)

This workshop is part of our Gift Series — participants will walk away with a finished adult-sized hat to give as a present, as well as the knowledge of how to recreate this gift over and over again!

Details:

Hat Knitting, Saturday, December 5th, 1-5PM, $45  (materials will be available for purchase – kit $20)

320 2nd Street (between 4th + 5th Ave), Park Slope Brooklyn 11215

718-369-0222     www.textileartscenter.com