The ClothGirl lives in a world of textiles, travel, dyeing, museums…
I hope you will join me in this exploration of cloth, weaving strands among world cultures and making connections.
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Textiles connect all cultures through time and space. The thread stretches back into time and ahead of us into the future linking the textile culture bearers – usually women. Cloth carry memories and history within the web to share with others and it is my privilege to find ways to unite people through studying and sharing culture through textiles.
It begins for me by traveling the world. My international experiences over the past 20 years have reshaped the way I think about our global environment. Being thrown into the unpredictable miasma of a world market—be it plaka, souk, or plaza—will change a person. And everywhere in these world markets there are textiles, dye plants, and the stories and memories of women.
Traveling Textiles
Much of my travel has focused on the cultural study of textiles, both ancient artifacts and contemporary cloth. I use textiles as interdisciplinary teaching tools in the classroom and my global perspective continually inspires me to develop future courses connecting history, geography and culture through a study of textiles.
Culture of Cloth
Although textiles are often relegated to academic backwaters in terms of anthropological research, the social significance of textiles cannot be underestimated. The most innocuous dishtowel and the most sublime Oriental rug are both produced within particular cultural contexts and are productive of those contests.
Judyblues Dyelab
My ecological, sustainable dyeing involves gathering the remnants of nature and capturing that in cloth. This process allows us to explore our own environment and understand our place in the world. Each recycled leaf, petal and scrap of cloth compels us to appreciate a changing, drying and perhaps dying landscape. What