Art and Design Commons^™

Exceptional Textiles For Today's Interiors Weaving Our Way Through The Design Community's Exclusive Showrooms, Mia Backman

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

This site seminar will begin with an introduction to the role of designer showrooms and their significance to the interior design community. Following this brief introduction, we will visit two textile showrooms: Donghia and Old World Weavers. These innovative showrooms were chosen for their diversity, leadership, and distinctive market positions. Donghia is known internationally for their creative weave structures that interpret classic forms into fresh modern designs. These light catching textiles are truly the antiques of the future. Old World Weavers industry expertise in the area of recreating historic textile documents has opened the doors to such restoration projects as …

The Weft-Twined Structures Of Cloaks Of The New Zealand Maori, Margery Blackman

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

The Maori cloak

After the settlement of New Zealand in about 1200 AD, Maori women adapted wefttwining techniques for constructing wann clothing suited to the cooler climate of their new habitat. The principal garment was the cloak made with yarns prepared by working and twisting the long fibres extracted from the sword-like leaves of the indigenous plant Phormium tenax, commonly known as New Zealand flax.

The historical evolution of the Maori cloak is largely unknown as only a few fragments and one cloak found in a burial cave are known to be earlier than the cloaks collected by Captain …

Between Tradition And Modernity: Textile Design Education In Lyons At The Beginning Of The 20th Century, Florence Charpigny

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

With regard to textile design in general, and Lyonnais designers in particular, there is still no global synthesis and very little detailed research available. Yet, some studies were published in Lyon, at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, by local historians with family, professional and cultural links with the silk manufactures. It is not coincidence that their work occurred at this period: at the end of the 19th century, the Lyonnais silk industry went through a series of serious economic and structural crises. The change begun at the beginning of the 19th century with the …

The Mystery Of The Eisenhower Toile, Cindy Cook

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

The Eisenhower toile is a twentieth-century textile with a story to tell-through its motifs and its creators. The motifs in this toile represent the story of Dwight D. Eisenhower's life. The creation of the Eisenhower toile is a story of mystery and intrigue involving a famous American couple, Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower; a prominent interior designer, Elisabeth Draper; a prestigious textile company, F. Schumacher & Co.; and a mystery designer.

The Eisenhower toile is a printed cotton produced by F. Schumacher & Co. of New York from 1956 to 1960. Schumacher produced the 36" wide fabric with a 36" repeat …

The Past Is Prologue, Lia Cook

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Since the early 1970s I have been interested in the construction of imagery in textiles and how the imagery that is an essential part of the structure can be altered through painting, dyeing, and finishing processes. My early pieces used a simple distortion of the vertical horizontal threads to create undulating parallel lines that defined what I called the "fabric landscape", a piece of fabric laid over a relief surface. In 1974-5 I applied photographs directly to the surface of my woven structures, sensitizing the cotton cords with photosensitive chemicals and processing the whole weaving as one would a photograph. …

Unit Turning Blocks For Designing Tablet Weavings, Bonita R. Datta

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

This paper describes a design process for tablet weaving with four-holed tablets. It addresses the following techniques: twining; Egyptian diagonals~ four-colour diagonals; 3/1 twill; and, 2/1 twill.

DEFINITIONS

Threading direction is the way in which the yarns pass through the holes in the tablets. These diagrams show the two possible threading directions. The fell line of the fabric is above, the unwoven warp is below, and the front surface of the textile faces the viewer.

This paper assumes all tablets are Z-threaded. The impact of alternating or symmetrical threading arrangements, and the operation of flipping tablets to reverse the threading, …

Transitions And Expansion: The Haskell Silk Company's· Switch From Thread Manufacture To The Production Of Yard Goods, 1880-1882, Jacqueline Field

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

The Haskell Silk Company of Westbrook, Maine, operated from 1874-1930. At its peak it was above average in size and counted among major U.S. silk manufacturers. The most northerly situated silk mill, Haskell began as one of New England's numerous post-bellum machine thread makers, but within eight years shifted to weaving broadsilks. During this period many New England thread producers made a similar change and at the same time opted to relocate with new plants in the vicinity of New York and northern New Jersey, where a variety of social and economic factors provided an attractive business climate. The Haskell …

The "New Deal" Child Artist: Textiles From The Educational Alliance Art School, Joanne Dolan

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

INTRODUCTION

Progressive educational theories, many which had their roots in the late nineteenth century, were put to the test as a result of the Federal Art Project initiative. A small collection of printed textiles at the Museum at FIT produced during the second half of the nineteen-thirties at the Educational Alliance Art School in New York City reflect philosophies relevant to the period of the New Deal. The textiles represent and illustrate major social forces in America: the late nineteenth century settlement house providing services such as language, citizenship, and skills training; Roosevelt's New Deal and the federal relief efforts …

The Calligrammatic Pattern: An Aspect Of Modernism In French Textile Design, Lourdes M. Font

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

This paper is less concerned with Twentieth Century French textiles as such than with what may have inspired their designers, with the possibilities suggested to textile artists in places where art, literature and design meet. To an artist with an appetite for the new, few places offered more possibilities than Paris in the decades before and after World War I. Between 1910 and 1940, textile designers working in Paris were part of a dose-knit community of the avant-garde that included writers, musicians, architects, painters, illustrators, interior and theatrical set designers, costumers and couturiers -- who not only mingled and took …

Tibeb, Art Of The Weaver In Addis Ababa Today, Jannes Waples Gibson

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Tibeb in this presentation refers to the decoration or pattern which is handwoven with supplementary weft into the border of the shamma (or shemma) worn by women and men in Ethiopia and Eritrea. The shamma traditionally was worn by the Christian populations of the northern and central highlands. Today one can find cloth with the woven tibeb in most markets. There is no imported textile sold in Ethiopia today that takes the place of these valued textiles. Ethiopian artist Maitre Afewerk Tekle has captured the special feeling among Ethiopians for the fine cotton shamma in his painting "Mother Ethiopia" …

Photographic Evidence For 19th Century Central Asian (Kat Production, Kate Fitz Gibbon

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Rare. early photographs can provide both factual information about the various technical processes used to produce Central Asian ikat fabrics and an evocative vision of the cities of Samarkand and Bukhara in the 19th century. These photographs demonstrate the physical structure and equipment of the various craft workshops necessary for ikat production, the preparation of the ikat warp. the application of the pattern, the dye process, and the weaving and finishing of the cloth. Other photographs show the production of the most common 19th century lining materials, and the marketing of ikat in the bazaars.

Ikat fabric received wide distribution …

A Horsehair Woven Band From County Antrim, Ireland: Clues To The Past From A Later Bronze Age Masterwork, Elizabeth Wincott Heckett

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Introduction

This paper has as its subject the narrow woven horsehair band from Cromaghs, Co. Antrim in Northern Ireland It is about two thousand eight hundred years old which places it in the Irish Later Bronze Age. Farming was well established in the country and skilled metal workers were producing tools, weapons and ornaments in bronze and gold. The horsehair ornament merits analysis because of its intricacy and outstanding artistry.

It is also important to explore what clues may lie within the band and the other finds associated with it. These may explain what the ornament represented to the people …

Weaving For Your Life: Creating Textiles In Dolp A, Nepal, Anne M. Johnson

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

High in the Himalayan mountains, two weeks walk from the nearest road, weaving is a necessity, not an option, for the women of the Dolpa region of Nepal. A woman weaves all of her life, and must weave for her family to survive the difficult life at this high altitude. Picture three weavers working outside in the late winter snowfall, seated on the ground within a low-walled enclosure. There can be more light and warmth outside, rather than inside, their stone houses. Weaving also provides a place of community, where men, women, and children gather to card fibers, spin, weave, …

Recreating A Warp-Faced Compound Weave With The Jacquard Mechanism -Considering Heizo Tatsumura-, Keiko Kobayashi

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Recreating of Ancient Fabrics

The technique of how the Warp-faced compound weave was once woven has been the focus of study for many specialists in Japan. It was around 1921 that Heizo Tatsumura began to recreate ancient textiles from the 7th and 8th centuries, found in the Shosoin Repository and the Horyuji Temple. He used the new Jacquard mechanism, which had been imported from France in 1873 with great dexterity. With this mechanism, along with his gifted creativity and inventiveness Tatsumura produced new techniques for the purpose of recreation. The very modem Tatsumura chose the Jacquard mechanism as his tool …

Electronic Textiles: Hacking The Museum, Barbara Layne

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

The subject of my presentation, Electronic Textiles: Hacking the Museum, is a project I orchestrated between the Marsil Museum of Textiles in St. Lambert, Quebec and the Glass Box Gallery at Salford University near Manchester, England. The purpose was to manipulate images of textile objects as a way to reconsider the practice of collecting, question the system of classification (and thereby the authority of the museum), and open up new possibilities for the collected object. The Marsil is the only museum in Quebec whose mandate is exclusively dedicated to textiles. Its catalogue system catagorizes the collection according to function …

Cheney Brothers, The New York Connection, Carol Dean Krute

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

The Cheney Brothers turned a failed venture in seri-culture into a multi-million dollar silk empire only to see it and the American textile industry decline into near oblivion one hundred years later. Because of time and space limitations this paper is limited to Cheney Brothers' activities in New York City which are, but a fraction, of a much larger story.

Brothers and beginnings

Like many other enterprising Americans in the 1830s, brothers Charles (1803-1874), Ward (1813-1876), Rush (1815-1882), and Frank (1817-1904), Cheney became engaged in the time consuming, difficul t business of raising silk worms until they discovered that speculation …

Dressing By-The-Book: The Significance Of The Sample Book In The Marketing Of American Men's Apparel 1925-1930, Diane Maglio

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Dressing by-the-book, or using illustrated and swatched sample books to buy fashionable apparel, offered the American man extensive assortments of fabrics, colors, and styles, often more than he could get from the local merchant's stock. The sample book was convenient for the seller because he could offer more apparel options to his customers without purchasing inventory in advance of sales. Sample books were used both by retailers selling custom-made clothing for wholesale manufacturers and direct sellers. Direct sellers, representing manufacturing companies, carried a sample book straight to the customer by-passing the retail venue. In this paper two types of apparel …

Light And Shadow: The Textile Designs Of Edward Steichen, Lola Mcknight

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

In response to a request from Kneeland [Ruzzie] Green, who was both Art Director of Stehli Silk Corporation and a close personal friend, Steichen contributed a group of modernist photographic designs to Stehli's Americana Prints collection, a series of artistdesigned textiles [1925-1927]. While several prominent graphic artists and national personalities contributed to this collection meant for use on silk dress fabric, the adaptations of Edward Steichen's silver gelatin prints received more attention from the Stehli company and from the contemporary press than any other single artist who designed Americana prints. These photographic images of weeds, carpet tacks, sugar cubes, thread …

Handwoven Dowries From The Gotse Delchev Region Of Bulgaria, Miriam Milgram

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

In the Gotse Delchev area of Bulgaria, girls in many villages still bring hand-woven dowry items to their wedding. These items include bread cloths, aprons, baby carriers, horse rugs. floor rugs, and bed covers. The dowry items are prepared by the girl and her mother, beginning as early as the daughter's birth in some cases. Since a girl and her family are Judged upon the quality of the work, it is of great importance that the hand-woven items demonstrate skill and aesthetic values. The competition to have the best possible dowry items leads to 'stealing' especially fine patterns, which in …

Spanier Arbeit A Tarot (Collars For A Prayer Shawl), Bonni-Dara Michaels

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Spanier Arbeit

A tallit is a rectangular piece of fabric with fringes (tzizit) at the four corners. Until fairly recently, it was worn as a prayer shawl exclusively by observant Jewish males over the age of thirteen. In Ashkenazic lands, primarily Germany and Poland, a limited range of materials was used to make a tallit. It was made of wool or silk, and was white or off-white with a black stripe. The center of one long side of the tallit was often distinguished by some form of decoration. This decorated area would be worn at the neck, functioning …

Kynoch Tartan: A Cultural Analysis Of Small Mill Production Based On Technological, Market And Social Frameworks, Ann Mclennan

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

"The picture of the industrial worker is not the portrait of the whole manthis can be painted, if at all, only after tracing his other social involvements and incorporating them."

A cultural analysis of any large entity such as a Mill is a difficult procedure.The focus of the following research is the development of a proto-industrial woollen Mill in rural Northern Scotland from the mid 18th century to the latter 20th century. It is sometimes difficult to separate linen,jute and woollen textile experiences as workers share so much in skill and social circumstance. Indeed, part of the curiosity of the …

Meeting The Needs Of Manufacturers: The Education Of Silk Designers In Eighteenth Century Lyons, Lesley Ellis Miller

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Theories about the best education for craftsmen and designers preoccupied a number of French thinkers during the Enlightenment: they included several notable inhabitants of Lyons, a city which depended for its reputation on the manufacturing of patterned silks. After several years of debate, the initiatives of these individuals led, in 1756, to the founding of a school of drawing (ecole gratuite de dessin), which received Royal approval the following year, and direct central government funding from 1780. The founders and administrators of the school claimed that they were targeting future silk designers to whom they offered tuition in …

Hogushi And Heiyo: Methods Of Creating Painterly Images In Woven Textiles, Kazuo Mutoh

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Proto-Meisen

The term meisen generally refers to plain-weave silk cloth patterned with woven (not printed) stripes or kasuri and made into kimono, haori, and nen'neko (literally 'jacket sleeper, " a padded coat worn during the autumn and winter months for carrying babies on the back). In the first half ofthe twentieth century, almost all Japanese women were familiar with meisen- as ordinary, everyday wear for the upper and middle classes and as dress-up kimono for working- class and country women. In the twenty four years between 1913 and 1937, according to the census, 200 million bolts …

Making It The "Old-Fashioned Way", Laura Foster Nicholson

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

It is tempting to consider the process I am about to describe as the result of a point of view which is subjective and maybe even romantic. Although the adjective "old fashioned" as used in the title carries a certain amount of ironic wit, in fact my method of weaving is ancient and timeless. I chose it because it is the only way I can adequately convey the majority of my ideas about the textile world. I also work this way because I love the process itself I have tailored my ideas, and risked hobbling them, in order to continue …

Between The Field And The Museum: The Benedict Collection Of Bagobo Abaca Ikat Textiles, Cherubim A. Quizon

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Any researcher working on vintage textiles and clothing from the Philippines collected during the early years of the American colonial period is likely to encounter the following informative catalogue entries: "From headhunters," or "From chiefs attire." Since the Bagobo people of southern Mindanao were also once famous for the practice of human sacrifice, the cloth, weaponry and ornament of these people were of high anecdotal value for collectors.

By contrast, a typical entry in the Bagobo textile collection of Laura Watson Benedict in this museum, the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), circa 1910 reads: "Woven by Antap [who specializes …

Faith. Hope, And Charity: Making Madras, C. 1880-1930

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Weft·figured Scotch leno gauze, known as madras, was made in Darvel and other Ayrshire townships that had by 1800 become highly specialized in the production of fine, patterned cotton fabrics. This paper shows how pride in madras-weaving skills and a desire to maintain them not only perpetuated the design and manufacture of these cloths, but also inspired the development of new cloth types. It demonstrates the significance of a passing reference in Three Generations in a Family Textile Firm (Jocelyn Morton 1971, p.49) to the response by Alexander Morton - a Darvel madras weaver turned merchant/manufacturer by 1870 - …

Dolls And Upholstery: The Commodification Of Maya Textiles Of Guatemala, Margot Blum Schevill

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Introduction

Maya weavers of Guatemala are well known for their beautiful backs trap and treadle-loomed cloth, which they create for clothing and related garments and for sale, both within and outside Guatemala. Backstrap weaving, mainly a woman's occupation done in the home, has an ancient history over two millennia, although there are few extant examples of the weavings of the ancient Maya due to climatic conditions (Figure 1). The process, however, was documented in ceramic art, and the tradition of handwoven clothing can be seen in monumental stone carvings, murals, and also in ceramic art. Today weavers purchase the yarn …

Damask Linen Manufacture And Marketing At The Turn-Of-The-Century: Interpreting The Biltmore House Collection, Kate Rehkopf

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Damask linen manufacture has a long and varied history. Appearing in Europe around the fifth century, damask linens quickly became desired by those possessing great wealth. Figured damask linen was especially prized and was often the only type of table cover to be used by royalty. Heraldic crests, hunting scenes, historical events, and other symbols or occasions of cultural importance were memorialized in figured damask linen. By the end of the nineteenth century, the use of figured damask linens was a symbol of royalty, luxury, and beauty.

These attributes figured prominently in the appointment of George Washington Vanderbilt's home, Biltmore, …

Reality And Virtual Reality: Extending The Tradition Of Compound Woven Structures, Rebecca Stevens, Laura Foster Nicholson, Lia Cook, Cynthia Schira, Barbara Layne

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

The following papers examine the uses of compound woven structures in contemporary textile art and the methodologies employed to produce this art. Using the working methods and investigations of three teachers/textile artists, these papers will address the interrelated role of high-tech equipment and handwork that gives today's artists the ability to continue the exploration of these traditional structures with a new flexibility and freedom. Collectively the papers will illustrate the creative choices the artists make in using technologies to translate their textile ideas into tangible works of art.

A "compound weave" is a woven structure composed of more than one …

Concept, Considerations And Creativity Designing And Making Textiles For The Contract Industry, Elizabeth Whelan

Textile Society of America Symposium Proceedings

Designing fabrics for the contract marketplace is more than just applying artistic and technical expertise to the medium. Textiles are often created and made with specific products in mind, such as furniture, panel fabrics, drapery, healthcare fabrics, and wallcovering. In addition to making fabrics that suit a particular function, the textiles also need to perform under basic industry guidelines and appeal to various aesthetic standards. The aesthetic standard is determined by market forces that comprise of a diverse customer base: architects, interior designers, facilities managers, and other product makers such as office furniture makers. American textile jobbers sell to this …