Conversational Velvets

Last week I had to choose a topic for my final project in Modern Textiles. There was one idea I was really excited about, but another student snapped it up before me (did you know that famed Seattle architect Paul Thiry also created designs for textiles?!). So I poked around at work and tried to find something in Special Collections that would be applicable. My boss recommended the J.B. Martin point papers- a huge collection donated by a famed French velvet maker. Point papers are basically graph paper on which you design a woven pattern –each square representing a crossing of the warp and weft.

Since there are thousands of point papers, I had to set a narrow focus. Most of the patterns are florals or geometrics, but there a couple of drawers of conversationals. “Conversational” is the industry term for novelty designs- the type of prints I was looking at for my menswear project. The thing is that usually when you think of whimsical conversationals you think of prints, probably on cotton. But woven into the fabric? In velvet? So part of my task will be trying to figure that out--for what possible purpose would you get these patterns woven in silk velvet?

Bassinet decoration for an infant emperor

Used for sexy underthings by a woman trying to seduce the ambassador to the Netherlands

One of Oprah's dogs has this on the walls of his winter residence

High holy day vestments for a priest in the church of Beefology

????

Cleaning Day

At the moment, my semester is in a bit of a lull. Midterms are over and final projects are just now being assigned. I have one week of light homework and then the following week is our (ridiculously late) Spring Break. There will undoubtedly be an end of semester crunch, but today I don't have anything pressing to work on.

It is lucky that my light work load fell on this weekend, because yesterday was cleaning day at Menno House. This twice yearly event requires that every resident washes, scrubs and paints from 10am to 6pm on Saturday. We each had a schedule and a list of tasks, and while there were some specific instructions, the general idea was "if it has a surface that can be cleaned, clean it." In the morning I cleaned a utility closet and helped with the kitchen. In the afternoon I swept, washed, and painted the front steps. The best part of that was that after I painted a step I was supposed to watch and pick out any dirt or debris that blew in and stuck to the paint--which proved to be nearly impossible. After that I took apart one of the fridges and wiped down every surface, and the day ended with cleaning the baseboards in the hallways and scrubbing between the bars of the railings.

It was completely exhausting, and this morning I woke up pretty sore (I think most of that was from bending down to paint the steps, but probably also because I am pathetic and weak). However, it is sort of amazing that the house gets cleaned that deeply twice a year. With eleven residents, a constant stream of guests and friends, and the general pollution in New York, a place can get pretty filthy in six months. But then again, how often do most people scrub out their kitchen drawers, wash the shelves in their refrigerator, and dust the tops of their door frames? It felt kind of good. Once it was over I put in some time sprawled lifelessly on the couch, and then I roused myself to go out to dinner for a plate of curly fries.

Inspiring The Children

Yesterday was the last day of the Vivienne Westwood exhibition, and while it is sad to realize it will now exist only in memory, we couldn't have hoped for things to have gone any better. We got lots of press coverage (way more than any previous graduate exhibition), the gallery was always full, and all the events we planned were rousingly successful.

That includes the event that I was dreading the most-- our Saturday presentation for 90 high school students. FIT has a pre-college program for middle and high school students who are interested in fashion, and for the last few years they had graduate students come in to do a presentation about their exhibition. Since my pre-exhibition duties were tapering off, I signed up to be on the team to plan the presentation. When the head of pre-college programs at FIT came to visit our class, we were shocked to have her say bluntly, "This presentation has not gone well in the past. We are giving it one last try with you guys, but if it doesn't go well we probably won't partner with grad studies again." *Gulp*

It sounded like part of the problem had been that the presentations in the past had sort of been thrown together at the last minute (not surprising considering the pressures of the exhibition), but it also sort of sounded like the thing was cursed. Past disasters had included 1) the main presenter getting horribly ill and someone who was unprepared taking over, 2) the one person with the correct power point getting horribly ill and not showing up, and 3) loss of power to the entire building. Despite having a designated back-up speaker and preparing three different back-up formats of the presentation, I didn't sleep very well the night before.

In the end, it all ran pretty smoothly. It took us a while to set up the projector, but since we had arrived two hours early, we figured it out in good time. We all dressed up 80s (we were told the kids would love that), energetically gave our presentation, divided them into groups, gave three rotations of three different tours, and then sent them on their way. I was sweating through my polyester lace top the whole time. The thing was, the kids were totally hard to read. They sort of just stared at us and didn't really react with excitement or annoyance with anything we said. Their blank faces could have been hiding any emotion from seething hatred to blissful enjoyment. Everything went according to plan, but we were left asking each other, "that went well right? Do you think that went well?" At the end of the day we went to pick our bags up in the Pre-college programs office, a few of the staff members asked, "how do you think it went?" I think we all wanted to scream, I DON'T KNOW YOU TELL US.

A few weeks later we got a glowing e-mail from the program head saying we had broken the curse and it was a great success. Ah, teenagers.