Blood, Sweat and T-shirts

I’m not very keen on reality tv, but I think I will watch this new series from the BBC, which takes six heedless young fashion followers for a taste of life in a clothes factory in India to “see how it changes their attitudes to cut-price clothing”. I hope along the way it will raise a lot of interesting and challenging questions.

I don’t know if this will be shown anywhere but in the UK, but for anyone who’s interested and can get it, Blood, Sweat and T-shirts is on BBC3, starting Tuesday 22 April at 9pm.

There’s more info at http://www.bbc.co.uk/thread/blood-sweat-tshirts/, which is part of a BBC web site I only just found – Thread – devoted to ethical fashion. The phrase ‘ethical fashion’ always seems to me a bit of a contradiction in terms – or maybe just a compromise, depending on how pragmatic you want to be. Wouldn’t truly sustainable dressing require a far more radical shift in attitudes? But since we have to begin where we are – it must surely be a movement (not a trend, I hope…) in the right direction.

Arte y Pico

Annica of Fabulous Threads gave me this blogging award – thank you, Annica, I’m very honoured to receive it.

There are 5 rules attached to this award and they are :

  1. You have to pick 5 blogs that you consider deserve this award for their creativity, design, interesting material, and also contributes to the blogging community, no matter what language.
  2. Each award has to have the name of the author and also a link to his/her blog to be visited by everyone.
  3. Each award winner has to show the award and put the name and link to the blog that has given her/him the award itself.
  4. The Award winner and the one who has given the prize have to show the link of “Arte Y Pico” blog, so everyone will know the origin of this award.
  5. To show these rules.

And five bloggers who I think deserve this award…

Caroline :: Carolineinckle’s Weblog
Monika :: Red 2 White
Margaret :: margaret-cooter
Liz :: Dreaming Spirals
Amy :: Red Fish Circle

awards

I’m feeling doubly honoured this week at receiving two blogging awards and I’m going to post about each one separately to avoid mixing myself up… so…

Monika of Red 2 White gave me the Thinking Blogger award – thank you, Monika, you made my day 😀

Now the hard bit – there could have been many more on this list but these are five blogs that have made me think recently:

Magsramsay
Solveigh Goett’s The Textile Files
FlyingColours – Juanita Sim
Neki Desu’s A Moveable Feast
Inspiraculum – Melinda Schwakhofer

plus – always – Jude’s What If

And these are the rules…

Congratulations, you won a thinking blogger award!

Should you choose to participate, please make sure you pass this list of rules to the blogs you are tagging. I thought it would be appropriate to include them with the meme. 

The participation rules are simple:

  1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
  2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
  3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn’t fit your blog).

That was that! Please, remember to tag blogs with real merits, i.e. relative content, and above all – blogs that really get you thinking! It is the first time I am starting something with my blog so I hope it doesn’t come back to haunt me.

Happy link-love-sharing, whatever it is!

TIF Challenge April 1

Sharon’s Take it Further Challenge for April is about change:

How do you see change?

I suppose I see it as essential to being. Everything that is alive changes all the time. The elements are constantly shaping the earth. Whether change is slow and subtle or dramatic and unexpected, it’s a given.

Part of change is growth. One of of my favourite Bible verses is about being transformed ‘from glory to glory’ (2 Cor 3:18). And part of it is decay. They are the warp and weft of life – inextricable, sometimes indistinguishable.

I’ve thought a bit about external change in my life as well. On a small scale I crave it – that is, I dislike monotony and have to work hard to focus on one thing for very long. I often rotate tasks for 15 or even five minutes at a time to create variety and stave off… not boredom, exactly… I don’t lose interest, but I get very restless. On a larger scale – we have been thinking for ages about a big change (moving house) but we are terrible at making decisions, so actually effecting a major change like that is such a challenge that inertia tends to prevail.

But I think the line of thought that will result in a TIF piece is that creative processes are change – the transformation of cloth and thread into embroidery; skeins of yarn woven or knitted to become fabric; the potent alchemy of dyeing; the turning of an idea or a vision into a tactile, shared object. And that as we create, we also change.

And my favourite change words – metamorphosis – variegate – refashion – worn – and begin…

layers of paint

playing on the computer

I rarely use the computer for textile design work – as I spend all my working hours attached to one, I usually prefer to get up and do something physical – but I’ve been grappling with a creative low and just wanted to get some ideas out quickly and maybe get a kickstart as well. I’m not sure about the latter but it was fun learning a bit more about displacement maps and playing at the same time. I tried them once before but had forgotten what to do; happily Mags (Digital Gran) has a great tutorial that helped me get started. I don’t have Paint Shop Pro so I was using Photoshop and trying to translate, and I found a helpful Photoshop-specific tutorial by Bob Comings  via Dale Glaser’s page of links to displacement tutorials.

I used photos of various samples I’ve made – prints, patchwork, shibori, felt, stitch, sketchbook pages, paint and collage – and a photo of sunset over the sea, and displaced them using these five images:

displacement maps 

These were the results (mosaic thanks to Big Huge Labs). The numbers read across from top left and link to the images on Flickr:

displacements mosaic
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

Next I’ll be looking at these along with the rest of the design work I’ve done for OCA Textiles 1 to find some interesting aspects to develop with fabric collage and appliqué techniques.