The needle arts are traditionally associated with the decorative, domestic, and feminine. Stitching the Self sets out to expand this narrow view, demonstrating how needlework has emerged as an art form through which both objects and identities - social, political, and often non-conformist - are crafted. Bringing together the work of ten art and craft historians, this illustrated collection focuses on the interplay between craft and artistry, amateurism and professionalism, and re-evaluates ideas of gendered production between 1850 and the present. From quilting in settler Canada to the embroidery of suffragist banners and the needlework of the Bloomsbury Group, it reveals how needlework is a transformative process - one which is used to express political ideas, forge professional relationships, and document shifting identities. With a range of methodological approaches, including object-based, feminist, and historical analyses, Stitching the Self examines individual and communal involvement in a range of textile practices. Exploring how stitching shapes both self and world, the book recognizes the needle as a powerful tool in the fight for self-expression.

Today, we are living in the New Space Age, where mass commercial space travel is almost within our grasp. This otherworldly possibility has opened up new cultural images of space, both real and fictional, and has caused fashion design and spacesuit engineering to intersect in new, exciting ways. Spacewear traverses this uncharted territory by exploring the changing imagination of space in fashion-and fashion in space-from the first Space Age to the 21st century. Exploring how space travel has stylistically and technologically framed fashion design on earth and how we need to revisit established design practices for the weightless environment, Spacewear connects the catwalk and the space station. This book draws together speculative fantasies in sci-fi films such as Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey, with the engineered spacesuits Biosuit, and the NASA Z-2 and with catwalk interpretations by the likes of Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan, Andre Courreges, and Iris van Herpen. While the development of commercial space agencies has led to new concerns for style in garments for outer space that re-think fundamental design principles such as drape, high fashion has experimented with new possibilities for weightlessness that extend far beyond the 1960s vision of Space Age metallic fabrics and helmet-style headwear. Brownie takes the reader on a fascinating journey from fantasy to function and to form, deepening our understanding of this new category of fashion that is prompting new approaches to garment design and construction both on earth and in outer space.

For the first time, master Navajo weavers themselves share the deep, inside story of how the best-known, most-admired, and most-collected textiles in North America are created, and how their creation resonates in Navajo culture. Want to weave a high-quality, Navajostyle rug? This book has detailed how-to instructions, meticulously illustrated by a Navajo artist, from warping the loom to important finishing touches. Want to understand the deeper meaning? You'll learn why the fixed parts of the loom are male, and the working parts are female. You'll learn how weaving relates to the earth, the sky, the sacred directions. You'll learn how the Navajo people were given their weaving tradition (and it wasn't borrowed from the Pueblos!) You'll learn how important a weaver's attitude and spirit are to creating successful rugs. You'll learn what it means to live in hozho, the Beauty Way. While many books have been written about Navajo weaving, techniques, and styles, almost no books on Navajo weaving are actually written by Navajos. How to Weave a Navajo Rug is written by two award-winning, professional Navajo weavers. In addition to their acclaim in the Navajo art world, the authors are professional teachers whose weaving workshops in retails shops, museums, and galleries across the country, consistently fill beyond capacity. Their book is based on years of classroom teaching.

Printed cotton sacks are currently fashionable aspects for material culture research, particularly in the costume and quilt history communities. In the second quarter of the twentieth century, these mass-produced sacks were relied upon by rural America as a valuable source of free fabric for clothing, quilts, and home decor. This book is the catalog for the Museum of Texas Tech University's "Cotton and Thrift" exhibition, which showcases the Pat L. Nickols Cotton Sack Research Collection. The Nickols Collection includes white sacks, printed partial and whole cotton sacks, swatches of printed sacks, instructional booklets, garments, quilts, quilt tops and decorated white sacks. Combined with earlier and subsequent individual donations, the almost 6000 feed sack pieces held by the Museum of TTU make this the largest collection of feed sack materials to be assembled by an American university, and likely the largest such collection in public hands.

Taking a major textile artwork, The Knitting Map, as a central case study, this book interrogates the social, philosophical and critical issues surrounding contemporary textile art today. It explores gestures of community and controversy manifest in contemporary textile art practices, as both process and object. Created by more than 2,000 knitters from 22 different countries, who were mostly working-class women, The Knitting Map became the subject of national controversy in Ireland. Exploring the creation of this multi-modal artwork as a key moment in Irish art history, Textiles, Community and Controversy locates the work within a context of feminist arts practice, including the work of Judy Chicago, Faith Ringold and the Guerilla Girls. Bringing together leading art critics and textile scholars, including Lucy Lippard, Jessica Hemmings and Joanne Turney, the collection explores key issues in textile practice from gender, class and nation to technology and performance.

The fashion business has been collecting and analyzing information about colors, fabrics, silhouettes, and styles since the 18th century - activities that have long been shrouded in mystery. The Fashion Forecasters is the first book to reveal the hidden history of color and trend forecasting and to explore its relevance to the fashion business of the past two centuries. It sheds light on trend forecasting in the industrial era, the profession's maturation during the modernist moment of the 20th century, and its continued importance in today's digital fast-fashion culture. Based on in-depth archival research and oral history interviews, The Fashion Forecasters examines the entrepreneurs, service companies, and consultants that have worked behind the scenes to connect designers and retailers to emerging fashion trends in Europe, North America, and Asia. Here you will read about the trend studios, color experts, and international trade fairs that formalized the prediction process in the modern era, and hear the voices of leading contemporary practitioners at international forecasting companies such as the Doneger Group in New York and WGSN in London. Probing the inner workings of the global fashion system, The Fashion Forecasters blends history, biography, and ethnography into a highly readable cultural narrative.

Collections of textiles-historic costume, quilts, needlework samplers, and the like-have benefited greatly from the digital turn in museum and archival work. Both institutional online repositories and collections-based social media sites have fostered unprecedented access to textile collections that have traditionally been marginalized in museums. How can curators, interpreters, and collections managers make best use of these new opportunities? To answer this question, the author worked with sites including the Great Lakes Quilt Center at the Michigan State University Museum, the Design Center at Philadelphia University, the International Quilt Study Center and Museum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the WGBH Boston Media Library and Archives, as well as user-curated social sites online such as Tumblr and Polyvore, to create four compelling case studies on the preservation, access, curation, and interpretation of textile objects. The book explores: *The nature of digital material culture. *The role of audience participation versus curatorial authority online. *Audience-friendly collections metadata and tagging. *Visual, rather than text-based, searching and cataloging. *The legality of ownership and access of museum collections online. *Gender equity in museums and archives. This book is essential reading for anyone who cares for, collects, exhibits, or interprets historic costume or textile collections, but its broad implications for the future of museum work make it relevant for anyone with an interest in museum work online. And because the focus of this volume is theory and praxis, rather than specific technologies that are likely to become obsolete, it will be staple on your bookshelf for years to come.