Pulling Strings Reference Library: Karen Thiessen

Our next Pulling Strings Library Project mini review comes from local textile and mixed media artist Karen Thiessen.  Karen can sometimes be seen at Needlework, the Pulling String Library's home base, stitching something tiny and beautiful, often with a Japanese flavour.  Her choice from her own collection celebrating the fine art of the stitch comes as no surprise.   Keep your eyes on the blog for even more reviews through April as we head toward our library launch!

Nui Project Embroidery Stitches 

Kobo Shobu, Japan, 2003 

Nui Project 2 Embroidery Stitches 

Kobo Shobu, Japan, 2007 

Sandra Brownlee introduced me to the Nui Project 1 and 2 books during a visit to her studio in 2010. The Nui Project is a group of male and female textile artists who have intellectual disabilities and live in a facility called Shobu Gakuen in Kagoshima, Japan. With the assistance of facilitators, Nui Project textile artists embroider ready-made shirts and other textiles to be sold as commercial products and the results are spectacular. The textiles aren't all wearable or functional but serve more as remarkable sculptural objects. Each artist has his or her own distinct style and the textiles are stitched intuitively. A common characteristic of the artworks is the awe-inspiring accumulation of stitches. I purchased the books from Yoshiko I. Wada’s Slow Fiber Studios online shop and they are now sold out. Contact the shop to see if the books will be reordered.

Karen Thiessen, textile and mixed media artist
www.karenthiessen.com http://dayindayout10.blogspot.com

Shirt by Naoki Fujimura and Aki Nozawa, Cotton shirt & Mixed Media, Hand work and sewing machine, page 38 Nui Project 2

Pulling Strings Reference Library: Susan Fohr

At the heart of the Pulling Strings project is a hunger to explore the stories that textiles tell us about our culture and how we relate to each other.  This book shared by Susan Fohr, Education Programs Coordinator at the TMC,  does exactly that.  We'll keep posting more of these mini reviews to mark the launch of our reference library throughout April - stay tuned!

The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Toronto: Random House Canada
(2001)

My favourite textile book is The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. As a museum educator, I am fascinated by the power of objects to communicate the stories of those once associated with them. Each chapter of The Age of Homespun features an object from a New England museum or historic site – including a native basket, two spinning wheels and a niddy-noddy – and outlines the role textiles played in shaping narratives related to nationhood, industrialization and gender in New England from the late seventeenth century through the early nineteenth century. I was particularly fascinated by the ways in which textiles, and the furniture that housed them, served as a means to build relationships and lineages over time, ensuring the preservation of a female line. Having begun my museum career as an historic interpreter (in fact my “textile education” happened while working at Black Creek Pioneer Village), this book reinforced my belief that we study history to do more than remember the past; we study history to discover how we can live better today and tomorrow.

Susan Fohr

Education Programs Coordinator

Textile Museum of Canada

Pulling Strings Reference Library: Sarah Quinton

Next up in our series of mini "reviews" from the shelves of some of our textile heroes is a celebration of a book that should belong in all textile fans' collections - as reviewed by inspired curator and Curatorial Director of the TMC, Sarah Quinton.  We'll keep posting more of these reviews to mark the launch of our reference library throughout April - stay tuned!

Sheila Hicks: Weaving as Metaphor

New York: Yale University Press for The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture

Edited by Nina Stritzler-Levine, with texts by Arthur C. Danto and Joan Simon

(2006) 

This book is an object. Its white embossed, textured hard cover is soft to the touch, with 5 cm-thick, 418 rough-sawn page edges that contribute to its sculptural heft. Not particularly large, as books go: 22 cm height x 15.5 cm wide. It’s the juicy ratio of height-times-weight-times-thickness that qualifies it as a full-on object. It can function as a one-hander, but it’s better with two. 

Sheila Hicks, an American icon of contemporary textile practice since the 1950s, has for decades made small weavings and studies made of found objects including natural materials, bits of paper, rubber bands and plastic – notations in miniature of her everyday life – reflections on decades of travel, rich studio experimentation, straight-ahead loom weaving, rambling material studies and design explorations. 

This catalogue of her 2006 exhibition at New York’s Bard Graduate Center visually documents nearly 200 of her miniatures with sensitively scaled photographs and first-person anecdotes surrounding their existence. Of her 2005 Cluster of Sounds, made of fine synthetic threads, she writes “Ninety colors intermingle, fuse into a muted mass, and become a tangled tone cluster. The more colors there are, the less color is distinguishable. How many colors make gray, and how many grays are there?”

If you are in New York this spring, don’t miss Sheila Hicks’s monumental installation “Pillar of Inquiry/Supple Column” (2013–14) on the 4th floor of this year’s Whitney Biennial.

Sarah Quinton

Curatorial Director

Textile Museum of Canada

Pulling Strings Reference Library: Susan Warner Keene and Joe Lewis

We hope you've been enjoying our series of mini "reviews" of textile publications from the collections of some of our favourite textile heroes, a companion to the launch of the Pulling Strings Reference Library. This post features a couple of meaty offerings from sculptural paper artist Susan Warner Keene and textile man about town, Joe Lewis.  Keep an eye on the blog or our Facebook group for more posts like this one over the next few weeks leading up to our April event!

Cut My Cote
Dorothy K. Burnham
Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum
(1973)

The title of this monograph references the English proverb, “I shall cut my cote after my cloth,” an admonition to live within one’s means. Dorothy Burnham uses it as her jumping off point into wider meaning in this important cross-cultural study of the shapes of traditional garments. In succinct commentaries that accompany photos of pieces in the ROM collection and diagrams of pattern layouts, Burnham considers: clothing with minimal sewing (or none); the development of the shirt; the influence of skin garments, and methods of shaping. Her observations about fabric widths and their relationship to loom development and garment structure are thought provoking to anyone who works with cloth – or indeed any material.

I came across this little book when I was a beginning weaver and it opened my eyes forever to the powerful connections among material, technology, economy, and cultural expression. Cut My Cote is a small but mighty example of Dorothy Burnham’s tremendous contribution to the understanding of textiles.

Susan Warner Keene
Handmade Paper Artist
Toronto, ON
http://www.susanwarnerkeene.com/

Textile History

Pasold Publications

If I had to recommend a print magazine or journal that satisfies my textile curiosity it would have to be “Textile History” from Pasold Publications. It is a peer-reviewed journal that was started in 1968 and publishes an amazing range of articles. I find it informative and it takes you in directions you might not normally go and expands your horizons almost by osmosis. It is history and deals in factual information rather then theoretical interpretations though it is as seen through contemporary eyes. This publication is an investment in time and money conveniently the Textile Museum of Canada subscribes to it and I can dip into it there. 

Joe Lewis 
Weaver, writer and publisher of fibreQUARTERLY
Toronto, ON
http://www.velvethighway.com
http://fibrequarterly.blogspot.ca

Pulling Strings Reference Library: Kate Jackson

Welcome to the second installment in our series of mini "reviews" of textile books from the collections of some of our favourite textile heroes, this time featuring two offerings from fragile embroidery artist Kate Jackson.  Enjoy, and keep on the look out for more posts like this one over the next few weeks leading up to our April event in connection with the Pulling Strings Reference Library!

A Handbook of Lettering for Stitchers

Elsie Svennas

Van Nostrand Reinhold Company
1973 (original copyright 1966)

The first book is small but full of amazingness... I found this book in a great used bookstore that lives inside a fantastic bed and breakfast in Durham, Ontario.   The book is full of photos of different letters of the alphabet done in a variety of stitches.  There are also some charted alphabets but the best part of the book are the last pages with each page devoted to one letter drawn in amazing fonts.  I would say it is THE go-to book for anyone wanting to stitch monograms.

 

Sassy Magazine

 

I had a subscription to the magazine as a kid...from grade 6 onwards I think...  and I recently found a box of the magazines in my moms attic.  I was super inspired by them when I was younger.  They influenced my fashion style, I learned what DIY meant and made a shirt/dress out of a pillow case as one issue suggested.  My friends and I made zines all the time I crushed over a pair of Fluvvogs pictured in the magazine for years before getting my own pair. The artsy cool independent girl vibe in this magazine is for sure somehow responsible for me wanting to be artsy cool and independent!  I remember being thankful for Sassy when I was a kid and I remember bringing it into school and showing my friends who were all reading YM and knowing that MY Sassy magazine was different and ALTERNATIVE! and waaaaaaay cooler!   Finding that box last summer and rereading them does not disappoint.  

Kate Jackson
Textile Artist
Toronto, ON
http://katejacksonart.blogspot.ca/

Introducing the Pulling Strings Reference Library!

Introducing the Pulling Strings Library - where you are invited to discover something new about and through textiles.

In scheming programming for Pulling Strings, we often refer back to books, zines, and other textile related publications and ephemera that live on our bookshelves or bedside tables.  It occurred to us that we could pool our collections and share them with the Hamilton community, hopefully inspiring some folks with new ideas and imagery in the process. Needlework (174 James Street North, Hamilton), a gathering space for textile fans, seemed a natural fit to house the library, and thankfully Kate and Liz were excited about the project as well.  We set up shop in the Needlework window just in time for the March Art Crawl, and that's where a selection of our collections are currently, available for anyone to drop in and peruse! We will be announcing a Show and Tell event involving some of our favourite area textile folks shortly.

In the long term, the library will move out of the window and in to the shop, and we look forward to presenting an evolving collection of books, magazines, journals, pamphlets, zines, artist multiples, manuals, vintage patterns, etc. 

Inspired by the Pulling Strings Library Project, we will be running book reviews by our textile heros right here on our blog, so stay tuned for those in the coming weeks.

We are also happy to accept donations of anything wonderful/weird and textile-related to include in the collection.  Please contact us at pullingstringshamilton@gmail.com to discuss!

Pulling Strings Reference Library: Robyn Love and Grant Heaps

Welcome to the first installment in our series of mini "reviews" of textile books from the collections of some of our favourite textile heros. First up are artists Robyn Love and Grant Heaps, who share a passion for quirky retro craft books.  Enjoy, and keep on the look out for more posts like this one over the next few weeks leading up to our Pulling Strings Reference Library event in April!

A New Look at Crochet: Using Basic Stitches to Create Modern Designs

Elyse and Mike Sommer

New York: Crown Publishers, 1st Edition 

(1975)

When I think of publications that I reach for when I am looking to be inspired, I want to say that my first impulse is to immerse myself in the writing of Louise Bourgeois or Anni Albers.  I want to say that because I do reach for my books about those great artists - and other great artists.  I want to say that but it isn't completely true.  My first impulse is to reach for A New Look for Crochet by Elyse and Mike Sommers.  It is part history of crochet, part pattern book and part showcase of what was happening in the world of crochet c.1975.  To me the book is pure inspirational gold.  It is the perfect combination of sincerity, absurdity and genuine artistry.  There is nothing flashy or even well designed about it, but it is its very earnest tone that makes it so compelling.  It never fails me.

Robyn Love

Interdisciplinary Artist

Queens, NY/Gilliams, NFLD

http://www.robynlove.com

Floral Potpourri
Juliano's Hang It All 
Pineapples on Parade

I love how-to books on textile crafts. I have been collecting these books since I was a child and fell in love with trying to copy the ideas put in front of me on their pages. I love them because they offer such great hope. With limited supplies and tools you can reproduce the wonderful things they offer up as lessons. As a child, I would try and copy and follow the instructions but I always struggled with my results-- those in the photos on the pages before me were so much better than mine. Today I find constant inspiration in these publications and use their patterns and instructions to create things in ways they were never meant to. Floral Potpourri is filled with graphed flower patterns ready to be made much bigger using scrap textiles. Juliano's Hang It All is filled with macrame directions that I want to manipulate into organza lampshades. And Pineapples On Parade is crochet pattern after crochet pattern ready to be pillaged for a mural of a roller coaster being consumed by a garden.

Grant Heaps
Textile Artist
Toronto, ON