All posts filed under: Textiles & Costume

Cool new resources

Published by The Dreamstress

I’ve discovered some great new or new-ish resources on the internet. First, I’ve known about the Textile Blog for a while now.  It’s a fantastic resources, and all of the articles are well researched, with the sources listed (something I need to aspire to – the source listing, not the research) The blog has had a recent upgrade, which includes a list of every textile related exhibitions on now at pretty much every museum, everywhere (OK, they are missing at least one that I know of).  I haven’t figured out a logic to the order yet, but it’s still a great resource.  Unfortunately, it makes me wish I could travel just about everywhere to see just about every exhibition! Second, I’ve found an exciting new blog.  It’s the blog I want to write but don’t have time for: Historical Fancy Dress.  It’s still new, so we’ll have to watch and see how good it turns out to be, but so far the indications are very promising.

A fabric tour around the world: The Far East (and the rest)

Published by The Dreamstress

Last week our fabric tour took us to India, where we visited Kashmir and a number of villages along the Coromandel Coast. Since then I have learned that kohlrabi is the most commonly eaten vegetable in Kashmir.  This has nothing to do with textiles, or this weeks wrap of the textile tour, but I still thought it was interesting. This week we tour to Far East (mostly China), and the rest of the world, which hasn’t done a very good job of getting textiles named after it. For our tour we could go anywhere in China, to commemorate crêpe de Chine and china silk. Guangzhou and Guangzhou Province were known as Canton before the 20th century, and give us Canton crepe. Shandong Province gives us silk shantung, the characteristic irregular dupioni-type silk fabric that is one of its major exports. Quanzhou in Fujian Province gave us satin, as the port was called Zaitun by the Middle Eastern traders who first brought it to Europe. Outside of China, but still in the far east,  Thailand is …