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Pennsic Bound! Class Schedule

7/28/2018

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 Hey everyone, I am on my way to Pennsic.  Really looking forward to all the dancing, teaching and awesomeness.

I thought I would post my class schedule and merchanting info here for reference. 

I am camping at Orluk Oasis, down by the lake.  It's section W10 on the map.  All of my classes will be held there in a really lovely courtyard of period pavilions.  Please come visit.  Definitely bring a chair if you need one, we have a limited supply.

Merchanting: Morwenna from Mid-East Magic has accepted my hats, jewelry, some shalwar kameez and a few garments I've made on consignment.  She also has really cool stuff. The booth is across from Midrealm Royal between the barn and the Middle Eastern class tent. (If you want something specific, send me a message.)
Classes!

Ladies Persian Taj headdress (Persian diadem)

2hours- taught twice
Wed Aug 1 2-4pm and Wed Aug 8 2-4pm
​Hats and headresess are a crucial element of Persian medieval dress and they are comfortable, beautiful and appropriate to a wide variety of climates.   This class includes a brief overview of Persian hats, veils and headdresses for ladies and a hands-on workshop.   This workshop includes a newly developed technique to streamline the sewing process.
​If you have a basic sewing kit, please bring it.   Hand-sewing skills are useful, but not necessary.
Each participant will make a Taj headdress from a kit provided. Each participant will receive a kit that includes base, padding, cover material and ornament to create a unique headdress.  The handout includes patterns so you can make more on your own.  Class fee for kit and handout is $15.   Limit 18 kits.   If you want to add your own ornament, a kit for a plain taj is $10. Observers are welcome as space allows. You may purchase more than one kit, I made lots.  Any kits leftover after the second class can be found at Mid-East Magic (across from Midrealm Royal). I will also have some kits available there before class so if you want to pick one out early, you can.

So is this Persian, or is it Turkish?  Complicated answers to the one Eastern garb question that everyone asks.
Sun Aug 5 12-2pm
​
Usually this question comes up about clothing, but it comes up a lot. And most people mean 'Is this 16th c Ottoman Turkish or is this 16th c Safavid Persian?' because that is the period when the differences seem most distinct.  This class is a basic overview of the complex history of Turkic and Persian peoples of Central Asia and the art and clothing they produced and what that says about who they were and how they saw themselves.  We'll look at lots of images of period art to help train your eye.

​I'm especially excited to show photos of some garments I've been able to examine firsthand in museums over the last two years. That includes the 3 Safavid caftans I examined at the Textile Museum in DC last month.  They are amazing and show some really surprising survivals of Mongolian design and sewing techniques, reinterpreted through a Safavid lense.

Researching the East: the Middle East, North Africa and Central and West Asia
Thur Aug 9 12-2pm
 How to ask the right questions, find and evaluate sources and have a great time doing it.   Includes tracking down academic journals, conducting research online and in museums and what to do when you get stuck. Includes several case studies from a forthcoming book on the patterning and tailoring of caftans along the Silk Road.
 
Handouts $3, limit 25

This next class isn't one of mine but I am so excited about this. Carla is doing the most amazing things with print-on-demand fabric. She is a textiles expert, particularly all things Ottoman.

Digitally Reconstructed Textiles in the SCA, a Discussion
Tues August 7,  1-3pm
Let's talk about digitally reconstructed textiles. A gathering for the Spoonflower Curious. We will be meeting in a digitally reconstructed Ottoman Sultan's pavillion, surrounded by many examples of photoshop produced textiles that will help show the potential of the medium and spark our discussion of theory. No photoshop experience necessary to fully participate and benefit from this talk. Hosted by Carla Monnich (the genius who is recreating some of the fabrics for my caftan book!)

Here is a veil band she reconstructed from a period example.  Yes, that is a printed textile based on an embroidered original! 

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Caftan book update

4/4/2018

1 Comment

 
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A 17th c mechanized loom for narrow bands. I got to tour the factories in Lyon in May 2017
Hi everybody!  Time for an update.

The research in Europe last spring went really well and I've been spending a lot of time on data analysis and the actual writing process.  However, I am behind.  Actually, I'm swimming in data and think I have enough for another book, maybe two.

So my revised schedule is to release the book in early 2019 instead of early 2018.  I'm grateful for everybody's encouragement and patience.

My current plan is to turn the finished text and images over to my editing and design team in the early fall and while they are doing their thing I will continue work on everybody's Kickstarter rewards.

This project has been so amazing and so many of you have been so helpful in sharing resources and bouncing ideas around.  It really does feel like I have about 3 books swimming around in my head.

I'll do my best to post more regularly and I cannot wait for you all to see the crazy stuff I found in England.  

Also, I'll be up at the Textile Museum in Washington DC soon for an appointment to get my hands on what appear to be 3 Safavid men's coats.  And boy, are they different from 16th century Ottoman.  I have ideas about that, lots of them.

I've also had some requests to start doing pre-sales. I'm not against that, but any pre-orders would be sent AFTER every Kickstarter supporter has theirs.

So essentially it would be Kickstarter supporters, pre-orders and then the book would be formally published and offered for sale on this website and Amazon etc.

I'm still thinking about it, so if you have an opinion, I'd like to hear it.

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An incomplete history of terrible ideas Part 2: Cloud collars

12/11/2017

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15th c cloud collar made in the Persian royal workshops as a diplomatic gift to the Russian Tsar. From Tsars and the East

​It's beautiful, right?  So what is it?

I'm just going to quote Schuyler Camman, who was a Professor of Oriental Studies at the University of Pennsylvania before his death in 1991.  He was an anthropologist and art historian and he did some ground-breaking work on Chinese symbolism including magic squares and the meaning of cloud collars. I'm planning to tell you more about the symbolism of cloud collars in his amazing article in another post.  

Anyway, Camman says,

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An incomplete history of terrible ideas

10/22/2017

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15th c Persian cloud collar. From the book The Tsars and the East.
​So I have been around old stuff all my life.  Not just museums, but I come from a family of antique dealers and was in the business for myself for a while.  And one thing you always dread seeing is a terrible restoration. And there are a lot of them around.  In the antiques world, it's rare 18th c. furniture that somebody decided to 'chabby chic' with a can of white spray paint, or an original oil painting cut down to fit a (usually cheap and gaudy) frame etc.  In the museum world, it's more frequently the case that the 'restoration' was done by someone who was supposed to know what they were doing.  And did not.

At one of the museums I did some research at, the curator brought the fabric fragments I had requested out in a big stack of cardstock.  She was apologizing as she put them down...."I know, I know, the preservation is awful and if we try to reverse it they will be ruined."

I took a closer look.  Is that glue?  No.  Is that...deep breath...velcro?

Yup.  Somebody many years ago got the bright idea to mount the rough side of velcro to a piece of cardstock and just stick the very old and fragile textiles onto it.  Meaning that all the little 'hooks' in the velcro are now embedded in the textile. I'm not actually going to say which museum, because they are pretty embarrassed about it.

When I visited Istanbul and went to the room of Muslim relics, each 'sword of some companion of the Prophet' was an old sword blade fitted with a fancy scabbard and a fancy new handle with an jewels the size of an egg. There may have been some genuine relics, but they are all so covered in gilt, velvet and pearls that you can't tell.  Lord deliver me from Turkish Rococo.  I hate it so much.
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Main Gate at Dolmabahçe Palace in İstanbul ccl by Haluk Comertel
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The main staircase at Dolmabache ccl by Peace01234
 When you can see past the chandelier, take a look at the bannisters. They are made of Baccarat crystal.  Turkish Rococo is what happens when 18th c Late Baroque French meets 18th c Late Ottoman Empire.  I hate it so much.

​There is a similar problem with one of the cloud collars at the Hermitage, but I'll show you that in the next post.

The reason I'm writing about ill-conceived conservation and restoration methods is that I've been editing the massive number of photos I took in Europe and I found one I had forgotten about.  

I really love museums that put the objects in their collections into context for their patrons.  It makes me all warm and fuzzy inside.  So when I finished with my appointments in the textile study room at the Ashmolean at Oxford, I took some time to see the rest of their really wonderful collection. They had a display about conservation issues and how best practices change over time and are mostly carried out by people who love the objects and are trying to do the right thing. And they used items in their collection that had been improperly conserved.

And when I saw this next item, I kinda lost it.  Just stood there and giggled for...awhile.  I blame the six hours or so I had just spent counting threads and measuring stitch length in some truly fabulous garments.

So I saw it.  And I did a double take.  And then I read the placard and that's what set me off.

Such typically British understatement.

"Syrian ceramic jar 1200 to 1250"...okaaaay....

 "poorly restored in the 1970s"
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property of Ashmolean Museum, photo by author
 ​Yeah.

Anyway, finding the photo got me thinking about other ways that objects have ended their lifespan in forms that the makers clearly never intended. Which brings me to the cloud collar. I'll tell you about that tomorrow.
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Wontons, a really long road trip and a river like a peacock's tail: Hansen part 2

10/18/2017

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So, more good stuff from Valerie Hansen's The Silk Road: a new history.

So I mentioned how incredibly dry the Taklamakan region is, right?  The average precipitation in one of the oasises is less than one inch per year.  Less than an inch.  In the oasis.

This incredible aridity means that lots of things enter the archaeological record here that wouldn't  anywhere else.

One of the finds that makes me particularly giddy is the food offerings from a tomb that have dried naturally and been preserved for 1500 years. Four wontons and a dumpling, you guys.  Chinese dumplings that look like what you can order in restaurants all over the world.  The  archaeologists at the site noted that one of the wontons was broken open and they are pretty sure it was stuffed with pork and scallion. (The way I imagine this conversation playing out at the dig site is kinda hilarious.)
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​And in the same grave?  Naan.  Seriously, Indian naan flatbread.  How cool is that?

Where did the naan come from?  It came with immigrants from the Gandhara region in India (including the modern cities of Bamiyan, Gilgit, Peshawar, Taxila, and Kabul in modern Pakistan and Afghanistan).  Take a glance at a map, that's a pretty long and terrifying journey.  From the city of Kashmir to the Kroraina kingdom in the Taklamakan Desert is almost a thousand miles and includes some of the highest mountain passes on the planet.  Hansen calls this series of mountain ranges, known to geologists as the Pamir Knot,  "a spiral galaxy of massive peaks radiating clockwise into the Karakorum, Hindu Kush, Pamir, Kunlun, and Himalayan mountain ranges."
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Aerial view of the Hindu Kush. Creative Commons License
Aurel Stein, a Hungarian-British explorer and archaeologist, retraced this journey in the late 19th c.  He was using the same technology and transportation used by the Ghandaran immigrants almost 2000 years earlier. 
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Photo taken by Aurel Stein's expedition at the base of Mintaka Pass 1912
​Hansen says, "Stein used a new route through the town of Gilgit that the British had opened only ten years earlier. He timed his crossing of the Tragbal Pass (11,950 feet, or 3,642 m) and Burzil Pass (13,650 feet, or 4,161 m) to occur in the summer after the snow had melted... He used human porters, as no pack animal could negotiate these tortuous trails. After crossing into China at the Mintaka Pass (15,187 feet, or 4,629 m), they proceeded north to Kashgar and from there to Khotan and then Niya. On some sections of the Gilgit Road, one can still see drawings and inscriptions left behind by ancient travelers on the rock walls. Travelers often had to halt for several months before they could proceed; like Stein, they had to wait for the snow to melt in the summer and could take desert routes only in cooler winter weather. During these lulls, they used sharp tools or stones to rub off metallic accretions and etch extremely short messages or simple sketches directly on the surface of the rock." 
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Summit of Mintaka Pass Aurel Stein expedition .1918 Photo by FM Bailey Creative Commons License by John Hill
​She also mentions that for some sections of passes the people walked along the sheer side of mountains using wooden pegs hammered into the stone cliffs as steps.  Carrying full packs.  Over sheer drops.  I am the tiniest bit terrified of heights (I'm better now, ask me about circus school sometime...) and I cannot imagine trying to do that.  Well, actually I can and I don't like it. 
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This is the modern Gilgit Road photo by junaidrao CCL
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Rakaposhi on Gilgit Road photo by Jamalguide CCL
 K​
I love digging up the details for the different legs of the trip, it makes it feel real.  There's a lot more awesome stuff in this book.  Here's the link if you want your own copy.

​One of the other things that caught my attention was descriptions of Kongque River, that is, the Peacock River.  It's a river with naturally occurring metal deposits dissolved in the water, turning it into shades of brilliant peacock blue and green.

Here are some pictures of the river as it looks today.  

​Can you imagine coming down out of those impossibly high mountains, or from the dunes of the Taklamakan and seeing this?
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Of Fast Horses and Really Impressive Hats

10/2/2017

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For those of you who've known me for more than 5 minutes, the following will not come as a surprise:

I am a museum junkie.  

The trouble with loving museums as much as I do is that whenever I travel, there is always some special exhibit that is over before I can get there or arrives after I leave.

So this made me a little whimpery:
http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/scythians.aspx

The two short videos on the webpage are definitely worth watching.  Quite a few of the objects in the second video are things I'm familiar with from books, including the gorgeous felted wool swan.

(This exhibit looks pretty interesting too: http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/living_with_gods.aspx)

I was in London in April, so I didn't get to see this and I am a tiny bit obsessed with Scythians and I'll be talking about them in the book.

Also, I want to hug the curator and feed him cookies.  
​http://blog.britishmuseum.org/how-we-brought-the-scythians-to-london/

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Caftan Book update

8/9/2017

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Hello, my darlings,

It's been a busy few months.  I'll start with a research update and then give you the big picture.

From mid-April to mid-May was spent on a research trip to Europe.  It was amazing and wonderful and really useful with some very nice surprises.

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...like this street art from London of...Mongol Warriors? M'kay. This was taken near the Brick Lane Market April 2017, by author.

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A New History of the Silk Road:      a marvelous book by Valerie Hansen part 1

1/30/2017

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Dried fruits and nuts at the spice market in Kashgar
Books make me so happy.  The one that's making me happy right now is   A History of the Silk Road, by Valerie Hansen.  This book focuses on the eastern half of the Silk Road, mostly from Samarkand (which can be thought of as perhaps the midway point of the trade routes) to China and mostly prior to the 8th c ce.

If you've attended one of my classes, then you know that I'm the tiniest bit obsessed with the Taklamakan Desert.  Taklamakan means "he who goes in doesn't come out again" and they weren't kidding.  It's one of the harshest environments on earth and yet humans beings have not just subsisted here, but built multiple kingdoms and civilizations.
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A new year and a New History.

1/18/2017

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     It's a new year and I have hit the ground running.  I'm working out the details of the research trip to Europe, I'm writing and organizing the huge piles of research.  I took a bit of a hiatus to apply for PhD programs and to deal with a computer issue. 

My hard drive.  It crashed.  I did not cry.  Also, I did not lose any data, which is why I did not cry.

I want to do a better job of blogging this year and keep everyone in the loop about the writing process for the Caftan book and my teaching schedule.  I have a pretty good idea of my schedule through mid-summer, but until I know if I've been accepted into a PhD program and where, it's hard to make solid plans beyond that.  However, I am happy to travel to teach and do workshops both for textile history and for dance, so if you'd like me to come to your neck of the woods, let me know and I'll see what I can work into my schedule.


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Detail of miniature painted in Shiraz 1460

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Books!

9/15/2016

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So I've been meaning to start the huge project of putting an annotated bibliography of my personal library on the website and it feels pretty daunting.  So for the time being, I'm going to add books as I acquire them or consult them for the Caftan Project.

I only bought 3 books at Pennsic.  I showed restraint.  But the 3 I got are making me really happy.

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The Splendor of Ethnic Jewelry (acquired from Mid-East Magic 2016)

This book is a catalogue of a private collection.  The couple collected jewelry from around the world beginning in 1959 and they see themselves as keeping parts of these cultures alive in the face of globalization.  Thankfully, they also acknowledge that once an object is removed from its culture of origin, its symbolic meaning is wholly or partially lost. 

I own several books on the subject of ethnic jewelry and the quality of them is...spotty.  In comparison, this book is impressive.  The photography is beautiful, the quality of the items is clearly superior to many of the examples shown in other books.  One of the strengths of this book is that items are labeled as specifically as possible.  For most of the examples, the author lists the current country of origin, the ethnic group and then the specific tribe or social class and occasions on which they are worn.

About half of the 400+ examples are from Central Asia and in addition to Turkmen jewelry, there is a fantastic array of Uzbek, Indian and Himalayan jewelry as well as a few pieces from places like Siberia and southern Russia that I have never see before.

I also acquired:

Fabric, Ritual, Man: Weaving Traditions of the East Europe Slavs (acquired from Feed the Ravens 2016)

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I'm just going to quote the summary in full:

Weaving Traditions of the East Europe Slavs (Russia, Ukraine, Byelorussia) are considered here on the level of ethnographic products of the 19th-20th centuries.  The articles produced by this ancient technology occupied an important place within the ethnocultural space, where their existence was not only of utilitarian character. Studying their function in the ritual and mythological contexts gives us the opportunity to understand the process of entering  the weaving phenomenon into the traditional world concept, where the technology by itself is a ritual process, a way of contact between man and the world.

This book was a joint project between a handweaving club in St. Petersburg and the (Russian) State Ethnography Museum and their stated purpose is to document cultures and technologies before they all disappear in the face of globalism.

The focus of the book is how each stage of textile production functioned as a ritual to move items from 'Nature' to 'Culture'.  It's absolutely fascinating and its ideas are taken up by other researchers such as Elizabeth Wayland Barber in her new book, The Dancing Goddess and several lectures I attended at a conference a few years ago that were concerned with world-wide exorcism rituals.

Two things to keep in mind about this book: It was written in 1992, so it has a somewhat Soviet world-view. The second issue is that this was translated from the Russian.  Normally this would not be a problem. But not only is the translator not a native English speaker, the material is conceptually complex, academic and abstract. It's difficult to discuss in any language. So it is definitely readable and understandable, but I had to take my time to make sure I understood what the author was getting at. 

Next:


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The third book acquired at Pennsic was a tiny little gem somebody told me about so I rushed over to buy a copy (I cannot remember where, I feel silly.) It's called First Aid for the Excavation of Archaeological Textiles and it really is a field guide for archaeologists who find textiles in digs.  Most archaeologists have a specialty in ceramics or metal objects, since they are the most common types of finds, so this book serves a practical purpose

I'm still editing photos from the trip and organizing files for the caftan book.  Next up: The Met, also known to some people (ok, maybe only me) as the Happiest Place on Earth.)
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