UPDATE ARCHIVE for 2020
NOVEMBER 3rd, 2020:
After 15 years of hunting, I've finally found a handful of
CraftsWoman. This was a business journal aimed at women who wanted to start their own businesses selling and teaching arts and crafts. It gives a wonderful snapshot of its time and certainly is contemporary with when Collette Wolff was active in the industry. So I'm especially happy to be able to finally put up this page. I still don't have all the issues, so I'll continue hunting...
If you need to contact me, use "akamoraih[at]gmail[dot]com" and you know to replace the "[at]" and "[dot]" with the appropriate symbols, right? Spammers look for those symbols when trolling for addresses to try - hence the dumb encryption. There's a mailing address on the contact page now, if you need to mail me stuff, and if you're having trouble figuring out the incryption, I'm fairly active now on
www.Craftree.com under the name Moraih. I enthusiastically encourage people to check it out!
OCTOBER 28th, 2020:
I have the sad duty of informing everyone that Colette Wolff passed away Friday evening, the 23rd, at the age of 91. She died peacefully in her sleep after a long illness. Her niece has asked that no flowers should be sent, but the family will decide on a charity that people may donate to in Colette's name. I am so saddened by this loss. Hers was the first personal page I put up when I began SUB. I am updating it now with more information and improving the graphics - I hope to do Colette's contributions justice. If you like to play with fabric and have never encountered "The Art of Manipulating Fabric" then you have a serious hole in your reference library. She was an amazing designer, selling her own patterns directly through her publishing house, Platypus Press. She was also at the forefront of the textile art renaissance that had its seeds in the late '60's and grew throughout the '70's and '80's. She was one of the artists who fought for recognition of textile arts AS art - something we take for granted now but was by no means a done deal back then. Crafts were sniffed at dismissively and seen as lesser and certainly not art by the arbiters of such things. Colette Wolff helped change all of that. I admire her strength, her voice and her vision. She is one of my heroes and I wanted to share her with you so that you will know her too. I will put up a link to her updated page when I get it done and uploaded.
OCTOBER 15th, 2020:
I have been deeply honored to have been given the responsibility of preserving and sharing the legacy of Doretha Albee. She ran a much loved newsletter called "Tatting Knots & Notes" and compiled a book from its pages. I have been gifted the original newsletter and book manuscripts with full permission to digitize and share them with the public. The book has her much coveted "Pineapple Heaven" doily in both the large and small size. The original manuscripts also came with all the samples that Doretha tatted to test patterns and share photos of in the newsletter. My guild has agreed to help me assemble a sampler book of her work to help preserve her tatting for posterity and make it safe to display at events. We will have the information for each sample embroidered on its cloth page, and the book bound in a zippered leather case for further protection. I'm still debating whether my leather working skills are up to tooling the cover with "Pineapple Heaven" or if I'll have to commission it. When it's done, I'll see that it gets to the IOLI convention so that everyone gets to see it. Thank you, Deana, for sharing your mother with all of us.
OCTOBER 1st, 2020:
I found this fascinating website that has done research on endangered crafts - it focuses on the UK and what it considers its heritage crafts that are most in danger of disappearing.
https://heritagecrafts.org.uk/redlist/ . It was an interesting read and I thought others might find it of interest as well. Some countries recognize their craftspeople and provide support, both monetary and public acknowledgment, for the leaders in their fields of expertise. The closest we come to this in the USA is https://www.arts.gov/ . Wouldn't it be terrific if crafts were a respected part of the art world, and deserving of the support given to accepted forms of art?
SEPTEMBER 1st, 2020:
I've made a whopping 1900 masks to combat the COVID19 pandemic! I give them away to anyone who needs one, and my local post office is giving them away to the elderly who come in to mail things. But mostly my husband has been giving them away at his shop to keep him, his staff, and all of his customers safe. So far, it's working. The news showed a map of the NC STATE area, and my husband's shop is right in the middle of a crescent of known outbreaks that surrounds his shop. It was chilling to see, but I'm really glad I took the time out from my usual cataloging schedule to sew instead - it appears to be working. We're not out of the woods yet, but solutions are being found. Please be patient and be vigilant in your safety measures. Remember that everyone wearing masks with simple handwashing and social distancing cuts down on viral transmissions 90%!
I had a computer meltdown in July but am back up and running. The bills are paid to keep the website up and functioning for another three years(thank you to everyone who contributed money towards this - I'm deeply grateful). I'm back to cataloging, now that I've got a stockpile of masks done. And I've done some tatting for the first time since my mom passed away last year. A friend asked me to make her a tatted snowflake like the one I made for my guild's annual snowflake exchange last year - so I did(and I hadn't forgotten how to do the technique I had to learn to make it!). That led me to print off the pattern I'd chosen for this year's snowflake exchange so I could go ahead and get it done in case we can have this year's snowflake exchange - and I've made five of it so far! The first was to prove to myself I could make something that complex(I had to learn an entirely new technique in order to execute it), and each new one has been a variation as I've added beads and different rounds trying to decide what is "best." I try every year to make a snowflake with a technique I haven't tried before, and to make it the most coveted of the snowflakes exchanged. I think I've really upped my game for this year! Muskaan, you're a genius! Thank you so much for sharing your patterns with all of us. She has a website https://tipsaroundthehome.blogspot.com/
JULY 1st, 2020:
I hope you are well and still practicing the pandemic safety protocols. If you do not have a comfortable face mask that complies with the CDC guidelines, please contact me and I will send you one. I spent my government check on the materials to make masks, and downloaded all the patterns I could find and made prototypes to see which 1)fulfilled the CDC guidelines, 2) was comfortable, and 3) I could make a lot of relatively quickly. I've made over 600 so far! I'm doing this because my husband was born with a poorly functioning immune system, and has a heart murmur - and he runs a small retail business. It is critical that I keep him healthy - not just from the COVID-19 virus, but from any ailment, because anything that weakens his system will further reduce his chances of surviving the virus. Even if you are young and healthy, it is still vitally important that you wear a mask until the CDC says the pandemic is officially over. You aren't protecting yourself by doing this, you are protecting everyone else. Healthy people with healthy immune systems will shrug off illness-causing agents without ever realising they have done so. The response "I'm not sick" is nonsensical and reveals a level of ignorance and calousness that confounds me whenever I hear it. Just because you are not symptomatic, does not mean you are not passing along harmful germs! The mask captures the water vapor from your breath, which is teaming with all the microbes we all carry around inside us. What the mask is doing is keeping those microbes trapped in the weave of the mask, instead of creating a cloud around us of organisms that will be breathed in by others. Wearing a mask reduces the chance of transmitting this virus by 90%! By keeping our germs to ourselves, we are saving the lives of people we have never met and may never meet. So be a hero, wear a mask! The life you could be saving is my husband's.
For those of you with at least modest sewing skills, the pattern I found easy to make and most comfortable with the best protection is https://www.prettyhandygirl.com/best-fit-facemask/ . If you have questions about putting it together, I can probably help. Stepping it down a couple of sizes for kid's masks was pretty simple too, and they fit much better than any other masks I've seen made for kids.
I'm still working on the scanning and cropping and converting of the covers and tatting articles for NEEDLECRAFT. I about have the scanning done for the first decade(yay?), and have a friend who's also a collector naively agree to scan partial pages from her own collection to fix those pages in my own collection that are too damaged to read well. So I'll be getting out "Photoshop for Dummies" again to figure out how to cut and paste pages together. (and thank you, Martha - everyone is going to owe you big time for this. I hope appreciative tatters will buy you dinner occasionally to show that appreciation!)
MARCH 1st, 2020:
The Quilting Bibliography is up and running. I'm still working on getting what quilting magazines I was able to bring back with me from Kansas cataloged(and the covers scanned and cleaned up and cropped). It's become a hard slog of late. On top of my grandmother and mother passing away last year, I've lost my baby brother to a tragic accident. I can't seem to find the energy to do anything at the moment while I deal with this, so please bear with me.
FEBRUARY 1st, 2020:
The Quilting Bibliography is up and running.
I'm still working on the scanning and cropping and converting of the covers and tatting articles for NEEDLECRAFT. I about have the scanning done for the first decade(yay?), and have a friend who's also a collector naively agree to scan partial pages from her own collection to fix those pages in my own collection that are too damaged to read well. So I'll be getting out "Photoshop for Dummies" again to figure out how to cut and paste pages together. (and thank you, Martha - everyone is going to owe you big time for this. I hope appreciative tatters will buy you dinner occasionally to show that appreciation!)
JANUARY 15th, 2020:
The Quilting Bibliography is up and limping.
I'm still working on the scanning and cropping and converting of the covers and tatting articles for NEEDLECRAFT. I about have the scanning done for the first decade(yay?), and have a friend who's also a collector naively agree to scan partial pages from her own collection to fix those pages in my own collection that are too damaged to read well. So I'll be getting out "Photoshop for Dummies" again to figure out how to cut and paste pages together. (and thank you, Martha - everyone is going to owe you big time for this. I hope appreciative tatters will buy you dinner occasionally to show that appreciation!)
