The 21st Century Matriarch

The two volumes of Designs of Kyoto: a collection of designs for silk and cotton textiles (volume 1 and volume 2) were published in 1906 and are available on Internet Archive. I’ve selected 2 sample images from both volumes.

I enjoyed the books – lots of nature themes and ideas for Zentangle patterns. Some of them looked very abstract – geometric – hits of realism. There is a modern quality to many even though they are more than 100 years old. Maybe nature images are timeless as long as the animal/plant depicted still exists in our world.

Silk and cotton are luxuries now – the inexpensive fabrics are synthetic creating a lot of ‘fast fashion’ with interesting fabric patterns….like these.

Continuing the blog post series prompted by COVID-19….

Here are the unique activities for yesterday:

Looking at Life Magazine for May 1944 – I found some early work of Chesley Bonestell that launched his space art career…mixed in with the coverage of World War II.

Finished reading Bruntsfield Brook by Charles Cockell. I bought the Kindle version after hearing about it in one of the Life in the Universe Pandemic Series videos. It was a fun way to learn about microbial mats…wound into a story with lots of drama impacting the different kinds of microbes: phages, ice, pollution, and drought.

Links to my previous “filling a day of social distance” posts here.

And now for a little project prompted by learning (from Charles Cockell in his Life in the Universe Pandemic Series) that Antonie van Leeuvenhoek first used macro lenses to assess the quality of fabric…then turned the lenses onto other things and became known as ‘the father of microbiology.’ For some reason I had never thought about what prompted him to be using glass lenses originally. So – I did a little project to look at different fabrics with the jeweler’s loupe…taking pictures with my phone through the loupe.

I started with the upholstery fabric on a couch. The colors are more vivid when they are magnified! I don’t know what the fiber content is…but it’s shiny…. that probably means it’s synthetic.

Clothes that I had that were labelled 100% cotton were all tops. 2 t-shirts (normal weight and thin) and a waffle shirt

I also had an older 100% cotton denim shirt. It is old enough to have some worn areas.

Then there were the cotton and polyester blends. The bandana didn’t have a label, but I lumped it with the blends because it was shiny. A pair of jeans and a t-shirt looked like cotton so I assume that the polyester part might be wrapped in cotton.

A quilted jacked had a looser weave and was shiny. A man’s shirt and my photovest were both a tight weave cotton/polyester.

I have a linen-look button front tunic that I have enjoyed wearing for years. I didn’t realize it was 100% polyester until I looked at the label. And it looks very much like plastic when magnified! I’d never thought of it as ‘shiny’ before.

I had two silk scarves which I included in my pile to photograph.

And then there was acrylic blended with polyester (for a cardigan), with cotton (for a ribbed turtleneck) and nylon for a lightweight unlined sweater jacket. The last one looks like the 100% polyester tunic – although the fiber in the tunic is woven and the sweater jacket is a knit.

Overall – it was an interesting project. I am always keen to apply what I am learning, and this project blended the astrobiology lectures and the Fashion as Design class!