November 17, 2009 – February 7, 2010
San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles
520 South First Street, San Jose, California 95113
Still Crazy explores the crazy quilt with a broad survey of the movement, mostly with examples from the Museum’s permanent collection. Crazy quilt making reached fad proportions during the Victorian period of 1876 – 1900. Made of fine dress fabrics like brocades, silks and velvets, and ribbons they were heavily embellished with areas of decorative embroidery or paint or even photographic images on fabric. They were most often made of irregular shapes and sizes, a kind of collage aesthetic, and they were pieced together with an astounding variety of embroidered stitches, in a multitude of colors. At the same time, crazy quilt designs had Asian influences, believed to be inspired by growing interest in the Far East at that time. They are dark, saturated and luxurious in look and feel, and the embroidered details are often nature inspired or symbolic or personal. This exhibit features an unusual variety of the kinds of textiles that were created such as quilts, wall hangings, table covers, comforters, to a one of-a-kind matching pair of Victorian parlor curtains.

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts features the archive of the Jack Lenor Larsen textile company, including collection selections available online. The Larsen Design Studio created modern, artistic fabrics for interior use, yet their innovations with handwovens, batiks and fabrics in scale with modern architecture have changed the industry. Here is Conquistador (1966, cotton), a particularly successful upholstery fabric that soon became one of the signature cloths of the company. In a note in the company archive Larsen writes that “Conquistador is my concept of how an Inca might handle a baroque motif. That is, flatly and without the robust movement typical in Europe. More like the stone walls of Peru.”

Open Source Embroidery Show, Oct. 2 — Jan. 24, Museum of Craft and Folk Art, SF, CA, The Open Source Embroidery exhibition presents artworks that use embroidery, thread, and code as a tool for participatory production and distribution. Open Source Embroidery includes workshops and exhibitions that investigate how the open source software development model has been incorporated into the language of cultural participation. This major exhibition brings together individual and collectively made artworks by artists, makers, computer programmers and html users that explore the relationship between craft and code through social and digital networks. The works experiment with interdisciplinary approaches to modifying patterns, the DIY culture of hacking and sampling in sound, GPS and mobile technologies.

The de Young museum, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park
November 14, 2009 — June 6, 2010
This exhibition features approximately 48 full-size and crib quilts dating from the 1880s to the 1940s. Quilts made by girls and women of various Amish communities in Pennsylvania and the Midwest are visual distillations of their way of life. The Amish faith embodies the principles of simplicity, humility, discipline, and community, but their quilts are anything but humble. Using a rich color palette and bold patterns, these quilts are truly a unique contribution to American textile history. The quilts highlight the beauty and complexity of the abstract patterns.

Credit Line
Amish Abstractions: Quilts from the Collection of Faith and Stephen Brown is organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The exhibition is supported by The Brown Foundation, Inc.

Here is the Antique & Vintage Sewing Machine Virtual Museum with a gallery of over 130 machines in order of country! I am ‘specially enthralled with the toy sewing machines & sock knitters. The toy Vulcan machines are totally cute in either vibrant robins egg blue or poppy red. I wish there machines for grown-ups like these! *sigh*

San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles
August 4 through October 25, 2009
408.971.0323
The World According to Joyce Gross: Quilts from the Dolph Briscoe Center
A selection of 30 important historical quilts & quilt-related ephemera from the collection amassed by Joyce Gross over 35 years. Includes 30 important quilts dating from 1845 to 1980, with an emphasis on appliqué quilts.

San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles
Aug 4 through Oct 25, 2009
Fabric Tattoos: Spirit of the The Mola
Molas are a traditional Panamanian textile created by the Kuna people of the San Blas islands and worn in their costumes. They are created using a unique reverse appliqué technique, where the layers of colored cotton cloth are turned under to reveal the colors in the layers below.

The Arnaldo Caprai Virtual Museum of Textile Arts is an online museum devoted to the textile arts, with the ability to search by period, typology, technique, provenance and keyword. Here is a beautiful Italian doily depicting a winged child astride a four-legged animal, made using the punto Venezia technique, and created between 1890 and 1910.