Selvedge

Before an orange-red curtain, This Interesting and Wonderful Factory and Civic Centre/City Centre play silently. These are films, made by Katie Schwab during her 18-month design residency at Plymouth College of Art. The film to our left is about Cryséde, a St. Ives textile factory that made silk designs and offered industrial work to women in the area. To the right, the film Civic Centre/City Centre, explores the use of space and design in local buildings. In both films, Schwab introduces us to influential patterns, such as block-prints and a faux pebble-dashed floor in Plymouth Council House. Akin to the...

In Issue 80, we published an article by Greta Bertram about endangered crafts in the UK. The HCA Radcliffe Red List of Endangered Crafts was the first research of its kind in the UK and set out to assess the traditional heritage crafts taking place in the UK today and to identify those most at risk of disappearing.  Four crafts are known to have become extinct in the UK in the last ten years: cricket ball making, gold beating, lacrosse stick making, and sieve and riddle-making. Seventeen are critically endangered, including clog making, hat block making, saw making and swill basket...

Happy St. Patrick's Day to all of our Irish readers! Ireland has a wonderfully rich textiles heritage, which we have often covered in Selvedge. Today we are featuring Irish designer Katie Larmour, who designs beautiful home furnishings using Irish linen. What led you to start your design company? I thought Irish linen was being under-celebrated. It’s such a wonderful textile with lots of gorgeous qualities and a rich cultural heritage. There has been an emergence of small artisan brands popping up all over the province in the last few years, from gin to coffee to woodwork, and it’s lovely to...

Fibre artist Michele Landel creates intensely textured and airy collages using burned, quilted, and embroidered photographs and paper to explore the themes of exposure, absence, and memory. The title of her current series, For There She Was, comes from the last line of Virginia Woolf ‘s “Mrs Dalloway” and includes over a hundred embroidered, burned, dyed and collaged images. The series emerged from thinking about all the women who are currently speaking out about their pain and trauma and are refusing to go away. To summarize this moment, Michele Landel brewed natural dyes in her kitchen using organic materials and...

In the Folk Art Issue of Selvedge (which should, if it hasn't already, be landing on your doorsteps soon), I was reminded again of the tradition of skills being passed down through generations and the links that textiles can provide to women, their mothers and their daughters all over the world. Bhairvi of Bhairvi's Chickan, who create beautiful chickan embroidery on white muslin in India says "The artists who are a part of our organisation are encouraged to pass on this embroidery tradition from generation to generation: from mothers to daughters to grand-daughters, as it was done traditionally". Not only can we pass down skills but the time spent...