I like to
buy books in a real bookstore – I want to see and feel them, and to leaf
through the pages, perhaps read a short section before I buy, and I just love
the situation when I am standing in front of the shelves, reading the titles,
and looking for ones that I don’t know about but might like. There are a few
books in my life that have been “wonderful reads”, and which I would have never
found if it hadn’t been for that shelf-situation, and a title flashing out at
me “read me! read me!” (A Short History
of a Small Place by T.R. Pearson is one of them.)
But it is a different story when it gets to English books, and especially to books on quilting,
fabrics, textiles. Living in Germany,
English books that I find interesting are still not widely available in bookstores
– although stores in large cities do carry English sections now. But I live in
a small place, and the local bookstore's English section is rather small, and mostly crime and
mystery. Books on quilting, on the other hand, are hard to get in normal
bookstores anyway, and I live more than 60 miles from the closest quilt store that
carries a wide range of books.
So every
once in a while, when I know what I want, I do take the advantage and buy with
that greatest data collector of all. Usually I ignore their suggestions based
on what I have bought before, or the “other people who have bought this book
also bought...”-section. But a few weeks ago the first book that popped up in
that area of the display looked promising and interesting: “The Art of
Manipulating Fabric” by Colette Wolf. Published by krause publications.
So I caved
in and ordered it along with my other purchases, and when it arrived the next
day, I was surprised at how heavy it was. Nothing compared to the usual
quilting book – 310 pages! It dates back to 1996, but is certainly not out of
date!
I dare say
unless you were trained as a seamstress or tailor you probably would never have
thought of even half of the multitude of possibilites of manipulating fabric
that are presented in this book – which does not cover any kind of surface
design currently in vogue, using dyes, prints, wonderunder or whatever. All
samples which are presented in black-and-white photography were made from
unbleached muslin. No fancy colors trying to attract my eye with currently
fashionable fabric selections, styles or colors.
It reminds
me a bit of a book I once received from my mother and from which I learned
almost all my techniques of handicrafts, published in 1954 in its 19th
printing:
But back to
my discovery of “The Art of Manipulating Fabric”:
The book is
divided into six parts by different methods, with a total of thirteen chapters:
Part I,
“Controlled Crushing”, with chapters 1, Gathering,
and 2, Shirring;
Part II,
“Supplementary Fullness”, with chapters
3, Making Ruffles, 4, Making Flounces, and 5, Making Godets;
Part III,
“Systematic Folding”, with chapters 6, Folding,
7, Smocking, 8, Tucking;
Part IV,
“Filled Reliefs”, with chapters 9, Cording,
10, Quilting, and 11, Stuffing;
Part V,
“Structured Surfaces”, with chapter 12, Using
Darts;
and Part
VI, “Mixed Manipulations” with chapter 13, Combinations.
In
addition, an appendix gives a brief introduction into stitches and a glossary.
The book also includes a select bibliography, followed by the index.
Non-native
speakers of English will learn a multitude of new vocabulary items – but I dare
say even native speakers of English might be confronted with a number of things
they had never heard of before. Or do you know what “shirring” is? (Shirring configures fabric with bands of
soft, rolling folds released between rows of gathering. The pinched, puckery,
stitching lines that bisect shirred fabric run parallel or diagonal to the
fabric’s edge, cross each other, or form multi-directional patterns. With its
network of gathered stitching separated by zones of fabric crowded with
variable folds, shirring shrinks the original fabric while adding substance to
the decorative fabric it creates. page 28)
The chapter
on quilting already provides many insights even to an experienced quilter and
exceeds the kind of information usually given in quilting books.
The chapter
on folding presents a multitude of pleats – such as flat, partial, protruding, or double-controlled,
to name only a few. So far I have only leafed through the section on smocking
which hasn’t been my thing in clothing so far, but I was certainly struck by
number of ideas how these things could possibly be included in textile art. The
chapter on tucking was one which I thought I would need for the workshop I went
to last week (but that’s a different post coming up.)
Still need
a hint for somebody who wants to give you a Christmas present? How about this
book? You’ll have plenty of exercises ahead of you, and many ideas developing
from it.