World Textile Day Scotland

I spend an immensely enjoyable day at the World Textile Day Scotland in Bridge of Allan. Apart from indulging shamelessly in textile buying I also obtained a true treasure of a book/purse which I will share you with you very soon and a wonderful beaded necklace from Africa. The other wonderful thing about these days (they occur annually, the next one being on the 20th June 2015) are the talks. First of all there was John Gillow (I am the happy owner of some of the fabrics he collected and sold in the past) telling us about the textiles of the Islamic world. You can see one above but I didn't take many pictures and instead bought his book (John Gillow. Textiles of the Islamic World).

In the afternoon we had Martin Conlan, owner of Slow Loris Textiles, talking about the ritual cloths of South West China, belonging to the Miao and Lao among other tribes, and the remaining pictures feature pieces from his collection. Photography wasn't easy as the room was quite dark but I wanted to capture some of the essence of his talk. It was from him that I bought my treasure. There was no way I was going to leave it behind regardless of cost. I can always starve myself! I'll dedicate a blog post entirely to that in the coming days, depending on what else is going on here.

In the meantime these textiles should be enough inspiration for anyone.

 

I was ready to pack my bags at the end of the talks and go forth on my own travels around the world to discover more textile treasures but sadly as a woman this is a much harder task and specially John Gillow has travelled through places to collect his textiles that at the moment are no-go areas for anyone, such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria etc. It was wonderful to hear about his adventures.

Sorry that the quality of the pictures isn't great and not as sharp as could be. I had aperture times of 1/4 second to contend with.

 

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