Could You Please, Please, Please...

If you have your own business card, swing tags/care instructions, letterheads/envelopes/stickers, rubber stamps, or cloth labels, can you please, please, please:

* Photograph them and post them on your blog and let me know that you've done so by email or in the comment section to this post, or
* Email me pic files, or
* Send them to me at: Meg Nakagawa, PO Box 1752, Nelson 7040 New Zealand, and if you'd like them back, please include a return address and contact email.

I'll post everything I receive here or on my Flickr if anyone else is interested. I'm very keen to see how weavers use these marketing tools. Thank you very much in advance.

PS. Talking with Ben and looking over all the paper tools I have, I realized I've never put my logo anywhere on the web site or the blog. Not sure if that's a bad thing or a good thing, but this kind of an inconsistency is a bit out of character. Oh well, maybe it means it's time to change my logo.

* * * * *

Bonnie Tarses Cloth Labels - scroll down on the post a little bit
Cally Booker Moo Cards
Cally Booker Cards

Oh, THAT Kind of a Day...

So I thought I'd have a cup of tea before I go out to weed and flicked on the TV; there's a man interrupting a Koala couple and collecting Koala semen; it was Koala conservation doco.

There's usually nothing interesting in the mornings on telly in New Zealand

In Nelson we have a local television station, (actually a series of them,) called Mainland which broadcasts the best docos from overseas, Al Jazeera, Germany's DW, China's CCTV, Bloomberg, as well as local news. But Mainland programs are not listed in any publication, and on their website they only specify "documentary", so it's a hit-and-miss thing, though when they show docos, they repeat them several times at different time slots for about a week.

It must have been Thursday when I caught the tail end of a doco on Brunelleschi building the dome in Firenze, and seeing as I've been struggling through a very slim volume on the subject for over a year, (again, I can't visualize some of the things they talk about because I don't have enough knowledge in architectural lingo,) I've been desperate to catch it with no luck so far.

On a more serious note, two and a half years ago, one of the first things St Martin told me was to get business cards printed properly and quit the home-made ink-jet job. Back then I liked the "all hand crafted" personal look and even looked for brown recycled paper for business cards. In the last year or so I've seen of my care labels fade in the sun and have been thinking he was of course right, I should get proper ones made up. But I don't like having different kinds of stationary, either. It's not only uneconomical, but also confusing.

I have only two cards, well three - two with my contact details, one without I use when my work is sold in galleries - and I print out care instructions, (English only; most Japanese know how to care for textiles,) on the back and use them as swing tags. The ones with my contact details without the care instructions act as my business card.

This morning I found Moo.com offers business cards; I think this is new because 18 months ago when I looked into this, they didn't have business cards. Anyhoo, although I like to buy things made in New Zealand in the first instance, I think Moo quality is tops and for value for money, (even with the Kiwi dollar scrambling at the pathetically-cheap end), and I'm feeling warm towards Moo, though I need to reassess what types of cards I need OR want.

What do you use as your marketing tool for your art promotion?

PS. Mainland also shows deliciously old B/W movies, but sometimes it times out before the end of the film. One time Ronette got so annoyed she rang them, to which they explained it's automated and has something to do with satellites! At least we know it's automated; sometimes they have Windows error message screens showing for hours.

PPS. When a Koala Baby grows big but still clings to Mama's back for dear life when Mama is in a hurry, Baby looks like an overweight jocky in a country horse race. I knew you needed to know this to improve your artful weaving.

What a Nightmare!

I woke up this morning dreaming the Red Gallery had turned into a gallery/toy store and I was working full time until the 23rd! What a total nightmare, with children screaming and parents getting angry, and at one point, I lost my blouse! What does it all mean??

Catching Up

Sales or jinxed? One was sold, another was stolen, so I think my cottons are officially jinxed. They paid me 1/2 of the wholesale price for the stolen piece, which I appreciate because I was expecting to get nothing for it.

Daniel Allen went to Auckland to shoot David Beckham (of the soccer/football fame) for the Australian Marie Claire. Daniel is English and football-mad, so I bet he was over the moon. You could say, my scarves were photographed by the guy that did the Beckham spread. Hee hee, hah hah.

And speaking of photography, Kath used pics I took over the years in her new CD, so... See it? See it? (Though one of the pics I know did not take, and Ben thinks he took the one shown here, but we cant' be sure because we shot a lot of similar ones at that Mapua Easter 2007 gig.)

Simple Kitchen Towels

As I was responding to KD in the comment, I reserve my cottolin to non-commercial purposes; for me, as gifts for my family, for exchanges. And they are inevitably things that can not only be used, but will be used.

A set of serviettes/napkins I wove back in 1995 is one of my treasures. They are soft and absorbent but still holds the colors well, in spite of heavy use. And I love the towels and bath mats I've woven for myself.

The thing is, though, when you go to discount stores, design stores, and kitchen stores and see a set of three handsome-looking towels from India, for example, and though they are most probably machine-woven, when you see prices like $15 or even $45 for the set, what do you think? I can't help feeling a little dismayed. I'm not saying all kitchen/tea towels need to be more expensive. No way! But I can't help feeling it might have to do with that dreaded reminder from art historians and anthropologists, that something most probably made by a woman to be used most probably by a woman in the house can't possibly be valuable, regardless of the "intrinsic" value of the item.

How many crafts and skills have we lost because not enough monetary value was placed on something made by hand, I wonder.

My Towels

As I type, these are in the washing machine going through an almost-hot cycle. I've done five so far; three to go in the exchange, plus my sampler, plus one for me. Since I have my usual eight-meter warp on, I hope to get at least four more, or three towels and some serviettes/napkins.

The top one is my first sample piece. Ben always wished I'd make things with samples that we could use, so I sampled 10 draft from Kris Bruland's Handweaving.net in this piece.

Second from the top, the weft is in true orange, and the draft is #57586, and I'm tempted to call it Flora Pacifica because each square looks like a vibrant South Pacific flower. It's the most cheerful towel in the set.

Third from the top is Pacifika Christmas, and is #58168. The colors of my warp in combination with this draft remind me of the Pacific Island tapa (bark) cloth, but using a red-orange weft it feel more like a Cook Island Tivaevae, and in terms of the overall appearance of the towels, I like this best.

Fourth one is mine; it's a wonderful blue-red but I wove it when my body was tired and the beating is very irratic. This is the reverse side of #36039, which I like better than the front.

The fifth one, though it looks blue, is more blue-green, #36180. It's the the most stable, reliable structure for the purpose among my choices. At first I wanted to call this a Christmas Tree something or rather, but it has near-white triangles, brown triangles, and green triangles, and to me it represents the different seasons and climate around the world at Christmas time, though we all tend to go for the white Christmas image. So I'm calling this Round the World Christmas, after a song in a hideous, (according to Ben!) Disney Christmas carol CD.

They will have been machine-hemmed, machine washed, tumble-dried and pressed (if necessary) by tonight when I post the finished pieces in the towel gallery. I feel guilty about cheating the "system", as it were, but there's still a bit of Saturday left on the West Coast of the USA, (OK, mostly Hawaii!) so forgive me.

I love weaving towels. These are true relaxation weaving for me. I never change the yarn source, and I stick with 20EPI (except when I do cram/space weave, which I do a lot with the cottolins,) so only the structures and colors vary. This time I downloaded and did not modify the drafts, so it has been all about colors. I've noticed a few things, especially in the difference in the appearance of the weft colors with the two oranges in the weft, and the two-dimensional vs. three-dimensional appearance of the cloth depending on the values and saturation of the colors, but I decided not even to take notes but just to enjoy the process. And I know in 20 years these are towels are going to be divinely soft and wonderful.

In plan are two or three light browns that are different from either warp colors, plus a indescribable red/pink - the only description I can think of is "pomegranate" but I'm not sure what that means to you.

Thank you to all those who participated, and visited our Towel Exchange. I sure look forward to getting my loot!

PS: Bockens and Holma-Helsinglands AB - are they known as Bockens or by their company name?

Towels Coming Soon

Sorry, I'm breaking my own rules; I was hoping to post my towel pics yesterday, but I've been reading! Fiction, to boot! I've complained for nearly three years until Nancy's ears nearly dropped off her head how I was disappointed with the last one-third of "Poinsonwood Bible", so she loaned me Kindsolver's "Prdigal Summer" a month or two ago. I couldn't get into it, or into any books other just gazing at pictures for all that time, but when I was sick last week and couldn't concentrate on anything else, I started it. (Among other things, it's bad luck in Japan to borrow things over New Years, so I thought if I started early in Dec, I might finish it in time to return it.) Well, it turns out I found it quite interesting and read it in three or four days, which to me is unbelievably fast. And I liked it for the most part.

I find it difficult to stay focused or interested where description of nature goes on and on, so the first chapter was hard going. I discovered I need people and interaction (which, to me, are "events") to stay interested in books, and this is probably why I like biographies, and can't stay focused on stream-of-consciousness stuff. I have a hard time organizing the different voices in my head enough I don't need to go into someone else's.

This novel had some interesting discourse on ecology, i.e. how dangerous it is to reduce the number of predators to the overall environment vs farming. I got bored with descriptions of flowers, trees, insects, and birds; for the most part I don't know them well enough to visualize and when I can't visualize a scene, I loose interest. But I could visualize a farm, (OK, maybe not a Southern farm at the edge of Appalachian Mountains, but I can visualize an old homestead,) and people and interactions, so that kept me sufficiently interested. Again, this would be why I tend to read stories taking place in cities, where I can smell the food and hear the sounds some times. But I hadn't realized this until this morning.

I'm excited about fiction again, kind of. I've got tons I've bought but haven't read.

Time for a quick bite and finishing my towels, then.

Petra's Bookmark

Kaz's workshop on Ikat and warp dyeing over at the UK Online Guild is over, and there have been wonderful photos uploaded to show everybody's results. This one by Petra Sclimme from Cuxhaven, Germany, caught my eye because it has red and yellow green, as well as orange in the mix. Nice. It really works.

Petra writes: "I came to the colors while looking at my point settee (is that the right name for the plant?). I mixed the colors from red, yellow and blue. Watch out for my second half of the warp."

Photograph uploaded with Petra's permission. Yeah, I'm thinking of making my warp now.

An Old New Book

I forgot to tell you that yesterday, while eating vanilla ice cream with chocolate flakes ex the tub, (I was trying anything to ease the itchiness in my throat,) a crown came off my back tooth.

So, feeling rather sorry for myself this morning, I made an appointment with my dentist for next Monday, then I went to the bookshop. I don't know about where you live, but from about August onwards, bookshops here are full of gazillion new cookbooks I covet. This year, the fashion in New Zealand is cookbooks with a historical twist, with drawings and etchings, photographs of old product packaging, aprons and dishes and doilies. I had my eye on one for months now, and so I went to spend a quiet time with it. Again.

I remembered also a 2004 Nick Bantock book I saw for the first time last week, so I sad down with it, trying to decide which one I should ask Ben for Christmas. Unlike his Griffin & Sabine series, "Urgent 2nd Class" is a brief book on how he creates his unique visuals.

I always liked stamps, postcards and maps so I was a big fan of his G&S books, but came "The Museum at Purgatory", the visuals got a bit too dark for my taste and I lost interest. But the more I read Urgent 2nd Class, I had to have it, and so I bought it for myself as an early Christmas present.

It's pretty amazing to think that the odd bits of stamps and postcards and candy wrappers I couldn't part with over the decades can potentially be a source of fun, not only in collecting and looking, but possibly in being put together as a collage or some such. And though I'm not allowed to publish any part of the book in any form whatsoever, a lot of what he writes makes good sense, even though I never saw much value in my collection of ... junk.

Great present from/for the one I love. Hee hee.

How Many Ways Can Life Go Wrong? Let Me Count the Way...

Well, it's not that bad, I assure you. I feel a little cheated because I just haven't had a nice break this year where everything falls into its place. Or rather, I haven't had a break from minor health complaints; is this normal life after 50?

I was enjoying weaving my towels in Swedish cottolin - I put on a 8 meter warp, 16-end straight draw in two gray-browns. I made this warp over 18 months ago and each stripe had 16 ends and having doodled a little about how I might try a pointed threading with 16 ends in each set, I just went with the straight draw and downloaded a bunch of drafts from Handweaving.net, but I said that last week, didn't I?

The cottonlins have been a bit dusty so I wore a crude, old plastic dust mask in a style that's been discontinued but covers my flat face adequately. Well, since Friday I couldn't stop coughing and I've had an itchy throat, and this week I've been doubling over coughing so I eased off weaving. Then I did something to my right ankle and it throbbed all Sunday. Came Monday I felt so grubby I actually went out and weeded the garden a bit - it was either that or stay in bed. My ankle healed just like that!! (What's that all about!!) But my cough (??) got worse, so yesterday was mope-around-the-house day eating overly-chocolately Christmas treats, blowing my nose and wanting to get on with things. Then I noticed last night my left ankle was throbbing, and I decided to be in denial of the whole thing. Then, last night, Ben started coughing and his nose is stuffy, too. So it wasn't the cottolins?

Yuck, yuck, yuck! I wished I had a complaint-free health for a month. And I was doing so well with three-times-a-week gym routine.