Voyages of Discovery

Exploring New Territory: 2015

Discovering new talents too!

This was a year of discoveries in more ways than “textile”.  We had a mini crisis with the Windjammer blog being “duplicated” and links redirecting folk to all sorts of nasty places (It’s fixed now by the way and both our computers professionally double checked for nasty viruses – all clean & clear!) and a mental breakdown when the camera memory card corrupted. 

Thankfully I managed to recover all but 10 of my precious photos - from a couple of thousand – about 8 weeks of travel to places we would probably never return.  (I’ll qualify that by saying - not because we don’t wish to, it’s just that living on the other side of the world makes it challenging in many ways to visit Europe regularly.)  The whole exhausting recovery process took months; figuring how to manage it and finally cataloguing files when retrieved.  Needless to say, I’ve been avoiding touching any photo files lately in case they vanish in a puff of smoke! 

So here I find myself in April already with NO entries in Textile Tourist yet.  So rather than take more time to include detailed research of textile offerings from each of the countries we visited, I’ll simply post up a few of the photos of interesting items we found along the way.  Somehow, I’d also neglected my homework in preparation for this tour and managed to miss quite a few textile museums, galleries or shops of interest.  I did find a link to the European Textile Network but the dots between our tour & those places did not always meet up.  Always wise in hindsight!

Sometimes the locals simply would not
share their textile secrets

Just so we are on the same table, I see Textile Arts encompassing patchwork & quilting, weaving, dyeing, tapestry, needlepoint, embroidery, textile design, spinning, knitted fibres, folk costumes and traditional motifs.  I know I’ve missed a few categories but it’s a start.  This list gives me a reference point to search for specific samples on my travels.  In some places we visit for instance, the best I might do is visit an ethnology museum.  A couple of excellent text references (to start with) are John Gillow’s “World Textiles” (an exhaustive techniques list) and “500 Years of Textiles” by Jennifer Harris. 

Even surfing the net yields surprising results - the Book Depository lists fascinating reference materials at a wide range of prices and Pinterest offers amazing catalogues of textiles visually.  I also find it interesting to talk to docents (trained guides) about their country specific textile collections at museums.

But I’ll leave the finer detail & last word to the experts.