Art Books

Not all inspiration for textile arts comes from existing textiles.  Art books can be a great source.  Not only for the representations of textiles in art, but also for themes and motifs.

One of the most common, the acanthus leaf vine, for instance, can be found in paintings, illuminations, stone work, metal work, and on and on.

We don't all have huge local libraries with shelves and shelves of art books.  Interlibrary loan is great, but so are some of the on line resources.  One of these that I have used as recently as this week is the vast catalog of Met Museum publications available on line, here -- many have free download of the PDF and full text on line.  Often even if full text is not on line, there is a "preview" option -- so you can get an idea of whether the book might be useful to pursue further.

Yes, for many things I like old fashioned "dead tree" books, but there is one advantage the PDFs have -- photos can be made bigger.  They do lose some some clarity, but it's a great help -- even if just to gather information to decide if you want to research a given item more deeply.

This leads up to the opening of a new page on this blog -- resources. Over the next weeks I will populate the page with resources such as on line books, museum collection search pages and even some of my favorite on line purchasing sites.  Watch for the new page to open soon.

Now, off to more fiber work!

Expert Panel announcment

It is official.  I will be making my Expert panel in Couching and Laid work presentation to Athena's Thimble (SCA East Kingdom embroidery guild) on September 24, 2016.  From now until then, all embroidery will be focused on that project.

The planned items will be:

• A Simple couched cord design
• A banner with cord couched around the applique.
• A piece based on the Italian pieces I talked about here.
• The Pelican medallions I did for a friends cloak, discussed here.
• A piece based on an Icelandic altar frontal (not yet blogged)
• A piece of underside couching.
• And, for the "master work" the Marshall hanging, based on the Bayeux tapestry, which has been discussed on several posts.

There are a couple of other items I'm considering as small example pieces -- samplers and "learning example" items.  There will also be a presentation of information on existing pieces used as the inspirations and the form in general.  

So, it's just about exactly 4 months.  There will be plenty of progress posts during that time!

To close, I'll leave you with a shot of one of the animals from the Marshall.

Thursday on Friday

Did you notice that I didn't update status yesterday?  Or last week?  Mainly it's because there hasn't been much change, other than a little bit of knitting and a lot of thinking.

Oh, and the scheduling of my expert panel for September 24 at the SCA Event River War.

This means, of course, that there will start to be lots of embroidery progress.

So, no actual run down this week, just take it as read that it's the same as the last time I posted, other than that the cowl is further along.