Summer

Yes, I was absent for a long time now, but... I was working hard too. The summer has brought me to many and very nice ideas. First of course all the preserving hat to be done, and of course the yummy eating of the many fruits from our garden. and then there was the kniting and new the sewing of course.

Reading was also in the list. I wanted to know more about textile arts in africa and found for ex. that the most apreciated wax printed fabrics whi

ch decorate the bodys of african women who look very gracious and beautiful in their traditional garments are MADE IN HOLLAND???!! Why? Because the Dutch have been a long time now in the african market. They send their peolple many times a year to the african countrys to search for trends. Why wax fabrics?

"In the mid-eighteenth century the Dutch recruited troops from the Gold coast to fight their colonial wars in Java. The troops returned to Africa with a taste for Javanese wax-resist textiles, which subsequetly were introduced into the region...By the 1920s, firms in Switzerland, France and Japan had adopted the process and fierce competition ensued to develop designs that would appeal to local tastes and reflect topical concerns" (The Poetics of Cloth/Alisa LaGamma). Now the predominant industry is Vlisco followed by Akosobo Limited Textiles in Accra, whose designers are trained in schools such as the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana

And the textile traditions that have existed for at least a millenium and continue to be practiced in west africa today? They have a hard time competing with the industrialy produced staff, many workshops must close as the big producers get bigger and bigger.

I wanted to try and see this wax prints and bought some at the very nice and recomendable site of Rosa Pomar http://www.rosapomar.com, and did as you see just some cute experiments with it.

Chullos and the right price

When it takes 6 weeks to make a hat of this kind how can you convince the buyer, that he is paying for 6 weeks work from the last few people knowing this knitting technique? How do you make the price.

I will be selling this hats and I'm trying to figure out what the right price is. I know what they cost in the making of course, but what will be the buyers be paying? I need to pay the transport of course and the import and earn something but most important, I would like to earn enough to be able to give the money back to the producers in the form of help for the school of textile art, to get electric light in their homes so they can knit at night and so on. Am I an utopist?

I admire the work of Maiwa Textiles in Canada very much. They say: "You may think that slow clothes would be prohibitively expensive to make. It is not true. The fact is that mass produced clothes (jeans for example) have production costs of a few dollars per item, yet consumers pay high prices for designer wear. What is missing is an understanding of the real costs of clothing and an appreciation of their value"

Anybody for suggestions?

Kaffe Fassett but with a different touch

It took me ages to finish this Pullunder but then my housband's B-day was coming around and this was suposed to be his B-day present! I had to work every fee minute of my day (and that is not a lot really) and I took the whole thing and needles just about everywhere I went, but in the end I made it.

This is as you know a modell from Kaffe Fassetts new book but I decided that the back would look much better stiped, but I made the stripes so that the colors from the front would follow the line exactly on the back.

The shirt is from Paul Smith and I think it does match perfectly.

Got already a lot of compliments, my husband wants to wear the pullunder everyday but it is too hot now for it. That makes up for all the work.