I've braved earthquakes and bullets in my hunt for fabulous fabrics.

Okay, yet again the art/craft binarism going on, permission to beat her about the head with a copy of Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, accompanied by a recitation of West's wonderful accounts of Balkan women's embroidery?

Plus, how is that wonderful textiles are only ( Read more... )

Wandered around Lecce today - v nice, warm and sunny, excellent conditions for viewing architecture in local pale gold stone.

There is a lot of the local (Leccesian) baroque, which is baroque as revisioned by somebody, usually one of the brothers Zimbalo, probably under the influence of some kind of hallucinogen, with huge amounts of twiddles and ( Read more... )

My attention has been drawn to this fascinating online archive of promotional photographs and advertising images, from 1939 to the early 1950s, of UK cosmetic companies.

And the main site, VADS - the online resource for the visual arts, has a lot of Really Cool Collections available:
African and Asian Visual Artists Archive
South Asian Diaspora ( Read more... )

I was really excited to learn about this:
Mrs. Delany and Her Circle
which is happening later this year at the Yale Center for British Art and then coming to London, yay!
This exhibition will explore the life, world and work of Mary Delany, née Mary Granville (1700 - 1788). Though best known for her almost one thousand botanical "paper mosaics" now ( Read more... )

As might be expected, Alice Beatitude, High Priestess of the Zen Cake Happening, did all her baking in full hippy regalia - the appliqued loon pants, the floaty tops with beads and mirrors, and absolutely never an apron - 'Pinnies bring me down, man, y'know?': yet such was her state of harmony with the Cosmic Cake Vibe that she never spilt or ( Read more... )

After making delicious pheasant and apricot pilaff yesterday, I have been thinking about leftovers and the various dishes that one can make with them which are delicious but which one would not, normally, make unless one had the leftover wherewith to make it. Though I think somewhere in one of Elizabeth David's books she gives a recipe that some ( Read more... )

Today I went to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, which I would strongly recommend. It wasn't really walkable from where I am, but I successfuly (eventually) managed to find the right bus stop going in the right direction and only missed the stop I should have got out at by a couple of blocks, so go me.

It's a lovely building (and it's free! ( Read more... )

The Great Barrier Reef lovingly recreated in a giant piece of crochet? :
The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef came about by accident. Wertheim read about a discovery by a mathematician called Daina Taimina: that you could model hyperbolic space using crochet, simply by increasing the number of stitches in each row until the fabric warps. ( Read more... )

Ah, Hadley Freeman, bless:
Show me a woman with a good three inches of cleavage on show and I'll show you a woman who has little faith in her powers of conversation. All fashion is, to a degree, a form of self-expression in that it gives onlookers an impression of your personality before you open your mouth. Some style choices, however, come with ( Read more... )

I've posted elsewhere about memorable reading or media of the year. So this is post about the exhibitions, museums, and similar cultural attractions I've most enjoyed during 2007:

Top one has to be Louise Nevelson at the de Young Museum, just because of getting to see that many Nevelsons all in one place.

Crafting Beauty in Modern Japan at the BM.

( Read more... )