Reflections on local history in sashiko

Above: study for sashiko textile reflecting on San Jose history and culture

Sashiko stitching has fascinated me since I was a child. I saw it on old plantation work clothes hanging in relatives closest, on patched quilts and on purses and on Christmas ornaments. I knew that the origins of this now decorative stitch was in practicality;  its function stemmed from the need to repair and reinforce cotton and hemp work clothes.

I suspect that the Japanese agricultural workers in Santa Clara also used sashiko stitching in their work clothes. It will be interesting to research this. A few years back I learned that the current San Jose airport was once a cauliflower field. Japanese Americans were the primary laborers.

In 1940 a bond passed to fund the airport construction. In 1942 Executive Order 9066 let to the removal of Japanese Americans from Santa Clara County. After Internment, many San Jose Japanese Americans returned to Japantown. Today, San Jose's Japantown  is the only California Japantown which returned to its exact prewar location.

In the digital sketch at the top of this posting, the bounding line between the blue and while background represents the this time of transition in 1940 and 1942. The circular shapes on the loop tracking back to the cauliflower represents the Japanese returning to  San Jose to create a Japantown on its original location. I would like to create a sashiko piece reflecting this history. I took images of young cauliflower as reference for this a few years back and have been stewing on this project. Recreating in sashiko stitching the fractal like patterns of the plant would reflect on culture, the past agricultural economy and the technology industries which replaced it.

More of these thoughts are at my textile blog: http://techfusionfabrics.weebly.com/index.html

Arts Splash! Montalvo Arts Center

Yesterday I participated in a student art festival at the Montalvo Arts Center. I had a drop in recycled art workshop station for children of all ages. Using recycled water bottle bottoms, cardboard, tea bag tags, food wrappers, produce netting, wire and an assortment of other recycled materials, people created nature related art pieces.

Above: project sample bookmark. Media: recycled cardboard, tea bag tag, Japanese comics and plastic sushi grass. A "L" shaped slit is made in the cardboard and the tea bag tag's string slips into it.

Above: Bookmarks created by children in the workshop. I had a wallpaper sample books that the visitors used. You can see elements of these wallpaper papers in the right hand bookmark.
Below: visitor create diatoms (water born algae with silica skeletons). I had sample images for each table of what these water born algae look like so that the children could draw inspiration from the elaborate silica skeletons of these creatures. I explained to them how such algae can bloom in abundance when our local creeks are clog with plastics.

 Above and below: A child's creation with wire and produce netting. She patiently sat working on this creature for quite a while.We had one table station set up to be for wire work. I had many mini pliers set out and the children looked at pictures of locally endangered creatures as well as drew from their own imagination for inspiration.

Above: A child artist created this car made of water bottle bottoms. I like the green person made of produce netting!

Above: A student sketches ants as he designs the construction of his wire creature.

Above: The student displays his final creation.
Below: using a template, visitors created flowers from wallpaper sample books and leaves from recycled sushi grass.

Below: Foam packing sculptures created by Rainbow Art in Cupertino

 

Above: a sculpture created by Ann Weber. Her amazing works are of cardboard. Yesterday she had a workshop in which children could get creative with staplers and an unlimited supply of cardboard. A small warrior tests out his new armor and sword below.

Above: The few remaining scraps of cardboard remaining at the end of the day at Ann Weber's station. Children were still cobbling together wonderful creations up to the last moment.

My son and my daughter enjoyed the afternoon at Arts Splash with their dad as I worked. My son was on a speaking panel of student artists who discussed their creative process. He had a movie in the festival. It was very inspiring to see the beautiful student art, some of which was quiet large. Next year I hope to see some of the performance pieces for the festival. I enjoyed seeing proud students in matching T-shirts from their schools and arts organizations roam around.

I visiting the Euphrat Museum at De Anza College today to drop off some items for an installation and to photograph images of my students' work to share with them. Today was the last day of workshop series I was conducting at Nimtiz Elementary in Sunnyvale, CA. The workshop series focused on exploring leadership skills through art. The goal was also to encouraging students to develop their personal visual and verbal vocabularies. I greatly enjoyed the children and hope to see them again next year in workshops.

Egyptian Headdress Craft at de Young Museum

On Friday night I conducted an Egyptian Art Deco headdress activity at the de Young Museum for their closing Friday Night event for the King Tut exhibit. It was a blast. I had my children as my assistants. Here is a link to the PDF files if you want to print these out and try them out at home or in a class. These templates at a new textile blog site for my textile research. I haven't figured out how to embed Scribd files in Blogger and for the other blog I am using Weebly; it is easy to insert the files so you will find I have posted them there instead of here.

Anyway here are some images from the evening. It was so fun!! I will be adding more images soon.





















Above: This woman was fabulous!
Below: My children were great models and assistants:
















Below: This guy spent a long time perfecting his headdress. He and his friends were so dedicated to their creations that they sprawled out on the floor when there was no more room at the tables. I had printed 100 of each of the four designs and only had a small stack of maybe 30 afterward. I had also cut around 200 bands and we ran out around 7:40 (event ran close to 9:00 pm). We were able to get some white card stock paper and we cut those for the headband strips. (Thanks, intern, Alex!)




















Below: This young artist was very creative.
She started to hole punch the gold paper and add the gold punched pieces as decorative elements to her design. Many visitors started to do this, too, after I shared with them what this artist had done.

Digital Textile Laser Cutting

I have been doing online research in to digital laser cutting of fabrics. Ponoko can cut felt as well as other materials. And this blog, FABerzLOG has some images of really interesting textile work with laser cutting. Designer Elena Manferdini is a multifaceted designer featured in this blog.

Online Project Doucmentation and Outreach

I am deep into planning out web documentation of two projects that I am embarking on and in the process I am leaning about various online tools to leverage.

Picking Strawberries on Gold Mountain is an elementary school history stop motion animation workshop series.

Cultural Tech-Fusion Fabrics will explore the ripples and echoes of immigrant cultures in Santa Clara through the canvas of ethnic textiles. The result of the research will be digital textile designs reinterpreting the blended visual vocabulary of Santa Clara County.

ONLINE TOOLS FOR DOCUMENTATION AND PUBLIC OUTREACH:

• Flickr is a perfect portal through which to document images and share images. It is perfect for me to location tag the streets on which I took photos of living textiles (what people are actually wearing). I will also be creating a Flickr Gallery (a collection of up to 18 images of other people's photos) and a Flickr Group (area people can join, comment and upload images all revolving around one theme.)
  
• Weebly, an online web design tool, has enabled me to easily design and build these websites. I have been able to insert slide shows of my Flickr sets with tags relevant to each project. This is a very simple tool to use and since I don't know Dreamweaver, I am using this to build my sites.
  
• ISSUU, wonderful online "magazine shop" One can print uploaded magazines for free. This is a good place to put up documentation for public sharing. Discussion forums and sharing features.
  
• BLURB is another publishing site, but here one can upload and purchase one book or many. You can put your books up for sale to be sold to individuals online.
• SPOONFLOWER: I will be using this site for some digital textile printing and to share my textile designs. People vote on textile competitions once a week here. I love the community feel they have built with their blog, competitions, Flickr site...I still have to explore all they offer.

I am sure I will be posting more online tools and sites as I move along in my projects. As both of the above projects have a public component, it is important that I research and absorb as much as I can now in the formative stages.

Rob Bell's Studio...Animation Stages

I visited Rob Bell's Zomadic Studio again last week. It is always so inspiring to see what he is working on. When I arrived his computer die cutter was working on cutting out segments for an architectural game.


















I felt like I was watching a dance performance as I observed the mechanical arm moved about cutting the wooden lace-like discs.


















I was visiting Rob to commission him to create a portable animation stage for the stop motion claymation classes I will be teaching at Cureton Elementary in Alum Rock, San Jose and in Cupertino in the spring and possibly in the Tenderloin of S.F. at some point. I recently completed teaching animation classes (using iMovies) at Montalvo Arts Center and am preparing to teach similar animation classes across the South Bay. The stage I have made are quite worn (made of cardboard) and it would be great to have a sturdy foldable one that I can transport easily. Here are a few sketch ideas Rob created on the fly while we were brainstorming in his studio:



























After we discussed my project I got to look around his studio a bit. I really enjoyed the detail on this piece below. He told me I could provide an Illustrator file and he could translate that into something his machine could reference to create such intricate etch cutting. I've been dreaming about such detailing on my stage ever since!









































Below is an image of a few of his building toy "blocks". We discussed getting together to think of ways to create elementary/junior high projects that would integrate these components into core curriculum projects. More on this later.



















I also met an artist, Chris Palmer at Rob's studio. He gave me the coolest fold up business card, which should not have surprised me as he is an origami artist. I loved the title on his card "Designer Geometer Ornamentalist Folder" His website is www.shadowfolds.com. His work takes my breath away. It really relates to the textile exploration I will be doing as he folds in fabric as well as paper. I'll be exploring his Flickr site more soon!