Montalvo Art Splash Installation

Today I spent a few hours with installer Dan of Montalvo Arts Center putting up the Cureton Elementary student textile works. The student work is in the Artist Residency Knight Commons above. The wisteria is in full bloom and smells wonderful! I cannot wait for the students to see their fabrics hanging in this beautiful space. I will also have a video of the art running on the TV in the Residency Commons. The students will be teaching a workshop on radial pattern design on Saturday for the Art Splash Student Showcase. They will be conducting this workshop across from the residency in the new Creekside Studio space area. This is a special place to be situated as we will be enacting the space for the first time, basically initiating the space and area for much art programming to come in that spot.

Project Selvage

I just received an email notice that Spoonflower is teaming up with Michael Miller Fabrics to present Project Selvage, a competition in which the winner will go on to sign a contract with Michael Miller and produce a collection of fabrics to debut at the Fall Quilt Market in October 2011. The theme of this competition is baby boy prints. They are accepting entries from today through March 24th. On March 31st, they will announce the 75 finalists chosen by judges from Michael Miller and Spoonflower and you'll have a chance to vote for the designs that will go on to the final round.

Michael Miller Fabrics has nice contemporary designs, but the contest site does not reflect the artistry or sophistication and whimsy of their collections. It was kind of a turn off to see the goofy illustration on the project site. The project homepage would look a lot better without this image. At any rate, having conducted an online textile project last year, I am interested in seeing how this project goes. I think it may be a wonderful opportunity for artists to enter in the profession of textile design.

Digital Banner Textiles with Children

As I have mentioned before, I am crafting a workshop series that will introduce children to textile design and which will hopefully result in street banners in the spring of 2011. I am in the last month of a Kickstarter drive to raise funds for this project.
Students at a San Jose, California school and at a Hawaii school have participated in the lead in introductory components of the project.
I have set up a website for the You Are Here workshop series.
Here are samples of the student work:
Hawaii 4th grade student radial pattern explorations

and here:
San Jose 5th grade student radial pattern explorations

Well, I just launched my Kickstarter project to raise funds for student created community street banners. Here is the link:
http://kck.st/fhbHwt

It seems that such crowd fundraising may be a good alternative to the traditional grant route. A few days ago the Wall Street Journal wrote an article, Tapping the Crowds for Funds, about this growing way of fundraising and the article mentioned Kickstarter.

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

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.

Zero Waste Pattern Design

In researching a grant I might apply for, I found a few interesting sites that focus on fashion and zero waste pattern drafting. The pattern pieces fit the whole piece of fabric without any waste of material. The resulting images of interlocking pattern pieces are beautiful and it is fascinating to see how they fit perfectly into rectangles of fabric. It is interesting to see these pieces take on three dimensional form as sewn garments. Precarious Design is by a New Zealand artist. The Outsapop blog has a posting on zero waste fashion that is really interesting.

The artist Timo Rissanen, Assistant Professor in Fashion Design and Sustainability at Parsons N.Y., has a useful and inspiring blog. In fact, it was through his blog that I found many of the other resources. Below is a sample of Mr. Rissanen's work.































It is interesting to note that the Japanese kimono is a zero waste garment. A traditional bolt of kimono fabric is a standard width. This width determines the width of the two back panels, the two front panels and width of the kimono sleeves; they are all the same width.

Below: Image of pattern from Precarious Design.

Shoe Designing Fun!

For several months now I have been researching digital textile design tools online and kind of as side research found that Zazzle has a great custom shoe design section. This feature has been around since early 2008 and I was unaware of it. I had a Zazzle account for several years but had not been checking in on the latest features. Tonight I took two of my textile designs and applied them to two different women's shoes: Ked's and Converse. It took just a few hours (I could have done it much quicker but was noodling around with color schemes, stitching, etc.) Growing up in L.A. in the late 70's and early 80's when slip on Vans were very popular, I never imagined I'd be able to design my own slip on canvas shoes. Pretty incredible how technology creates such opportunities.









































Zazzle has a fantastic preview section. I got sucked in playing around with the numerous options. Great intuitive interface design at this site. Here is a screen capture below. You can look at your shoe from all angles and even view a pair of shoes of your design.




















Above: You can apply your custom textile to the exterior canvas surfaces of of the shoe.
Below: You can view your custom textile design on the flat pattern pieces. You can also download these pattern templates so that you can create seamless designs that wrap from one section of the shoe to another.











































The Snap2Objects blog has a great listing on different custom shoe sites.
I have created many sculptural shoes of Asian food wrappers, so it is fun for me to begin to create real shoes that people can wear.

Below are a few examples of my sculptural shoes. These are made of wrappers and wire and so cannot be worn (I've been asked many times and wish I could say "Yes, slip them on!")
Below: Poison Ivy Pump. This piece was exhibited at an Arts and Embassies Exhibit in Brussels last year.























Plantation Tabi sculptural shoes created of Morinaga Candy boxes and my grandfather's photos, seaweed candy wrappers and WWII bombing leaflets.






















1942 Shoe: this piece was in a Fuller Craft Museum exhibit last year.

Digital Textile from de Young visitor project

A few days ago I received the test fabric I ordered from Spoonflower. The colors came out great. Here is my daughter modeling the scarf I made of the textile.


The image pattern was created by scanning paper and wire tiles created by visitors to the de Young Museum during my residency a year ago. The images were aligned in Photoshop and sent as a jpg file to Spoonflower to print.

De Young Residency Revisited in Textile Design

A year ago I had an artist residency at the de Young Museum and designed a visitor participatory project of wire and repurposed materials.







































I saved most of the visitor created tiles and have scanned a few for experimentation in my textile designs. I have sent this below pattern tile to Spoonflower for a test swatch. I have hundreds of these unique round butterfly tiles created by adults and children who visited the de Young during my residency. I selected these few for my fabric design.
























You can design a repeat pattern in Photoshop by selecting the area of your image to repeat and then select Edit: Define Pattern. Below is a swatch of area created with this technique.
























I discovered that I could also increase the random look by selecting "half drop" in the Spoonflower settings. I am interested in the creation of textiles that are touched by many individuals hands and imaginations. Designing textile patterns which draw upon public collaborative projects is a fascinating direction to me. What garments and objects can be sewn from such unique fabrics and how can these sewn objects reflect further on community?

Silicon Valley Textile

I am experimenting with cultural artifacts (Chinese food wrappers, sushi grass, rice bags), and computer chip elements to reflect on Silicon Valley and its rich cultural mix. This is just a test. I'd love to incorporate elements from Indian saris, Mexican textiles, and other prominent cultures here in Silicon Valley. I have also included a hint at San Jose's agricultural past in the strawberry leaves. Rough and ragged test done in three hours. I need to work on coherent color schemes more.

I was inspired by this artist, Angie Bacskocky who created the textile surface design for fashion designer Alexander McQueen. I have also begun to research Basso and Brooke an interesting fashion design duo....a Brazilian graphic designer teamed up with a European fashion designer. Amazing digital textile designs in their collections. Here are some more images of their work: http://www.style.com/fashionshows/review/S2009RTW-BASSOB I especially like the surface design on their Spring RTW 2009 collection as it incorporated Japanese textile motifs.

Digital Textile Printers:
I have been researching digital textile printers specializing in silks and fine fabrics for apparel. I found these two:
SuperSample
First2Print

Below: I am no fashion designer, but I sketched this to show the scale that the textile might be used at.

Fruit Leaf Studies for Fabric

I just discovered that one can create a pattern that has transparency in Photoshop. This is great because you can apply one pattern over another. Here are studies of apricot and strawberry leaves bases on a color scheme from a kimono I have. If you look closely you can see I made a mistake in the tiling on the apricot leaves (the red ones). I will need to review online tiling tips to learn how to eliminate these misalignment of register.
























These preliminary studies below were draw in Illustrator using photos as templates. My neighbor was kind enough to give me an old Wacom Tablet to use. It has certainly saved my hands in drawing on the computer! I used to demo for this company years ago at trade shows such as MacWorld, but no longer had a tablet. It was great to get one for free. Perfect timing for me.
























Below: Free form pattern test using Chinese and Mexican food wrappers, Japanese sashiko stitch pattern and cherry blossoms. It would be fun to echo the yellow sashiko stitching pattern by hand stitching yellow thread over the textiles.

More Fun with Digital Textie Design

Here are more experimenting with digital tiling for textiles. I sent this out to Spoonflower in two different color schemes for fabric swatches in different types of cottons. I also ordered a color chart on different fabrics. You can order the color chart here http://blog.spoonflower.com/2008/05/how-do-i-prepar.html I am still trying to figure out how to download their color chart into my swatches palette in Photoshop.

Below is my pencil sketch of a Chinese peony motif. I designed it to look a bit like flames as I am researching the last of San Jose's six Chinatowns, Heinlenville. It was brick. It was walled and it was locked. It was a unique enclave build by a German immigrant for the Chinese community in response to the arson burnings of other San Jose Chinatowns in the late 1800's. So the hint of flame, for me, alludes to a special community that emerged from the ashes of arson attacks.

























I redrew the flower in Illustration incorporating strawberry motifs alluding to the agricultural economy which brought many early immigrants to San Jose. Into the flower, I inserted an image of an actual Chinese coin from Heinlenville that was lent to me by the historian, Connie Young Yu. Her grandparents had a store in this Chinatown. This coin was front her grandma's till box.























A common Japanese sashiko stitch motif was re created in Illustrator and applied in Photoshop to the initial tile image above. Japantown San Jose formed around Heinlenville. Below, De La Rosa peanut candy wrappers were added to the pattern. I spoke with San Jose Latina artist Lydia Sanchez and she told me that this particular candy represented a tangible (and tasty!) tie to her heritage growing up. I visit Mexican markets in San Jose for these yummy treats. Mexicans, Japanese, and Chinese all labored in the strawberry fields of Santa Clara. The final print tile (below and at top) is a blending of three cultures important to the shaping of San Jose's early cultural mix.

I'm working on a grant application relating to this. Here are some thoughts on it:
Textiles anchor us to cultural memories and help shape new identities. This project is rooted in the knowledge that Santa Clara county is the most ethnically diverse county in Northern California. Cultural exchanges and creative cultural blending occurs on a daily basis on many different levels. This project is an opportunity to reflect on the past while shaping a context in which to understand the present and envision the future. Digitally blending cultures and histories into innovative technologically created fabrics invites us to reflect in fresh ways on who we are as a community. These textiles honor the experiences of ethnic groups who shaped the Valley's agricultural past while also celebrate the blending of ethnic groups today and the digital economy driving it.

Reflecting on Hawaiian Textile History

I am starting to distill ideas for a grant application letter of intent. The collaboration I hope to fund would examine Hawaiian Aloha textiles and garments designed by a Alfred Shaheen. It would explore the divergence and threads of commonality between the exported image of Hawaii and the actual Hawaii lived by Japanese Hawaiians.

Here is a digital sketch of one component of the project. This hanging curtain of pattern pieces would be composed of sample work in progress pattern shapes. The pattern pieces will be digitally printed with images of my textile designs. The installation would also include pattern pieces in the shape of objects from Hawaii plantation era and perhaps silhouettes echoing the diverse cultures of Silicon Valley today. Already some of the pattern shapes remind me of Hawaiian objects...such as poi pounders.

The above is just a rough concept. I really need to iron out the whole project and make it tightly fit. I visualize working with Colleen Quen, an amazing San Francisco fashion designer. The partnering nonprofit would be The San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles.

I am really excited about the possibility of creating my own textile prints that reflect a fading visual vocabulary of the Japanese Hawaiian experiences. This grant would enable me to explore that direction and to bridge my digital skills with my fine art mixed media skills.

Here is a company that will print digital textiles. I have read great things about it and look forward to testing them out: Spoonflower.

This production service in Scotland looks amazing. Centre For Advanced Textiles at The Glasglow School of Art.