Rainbow Tunnel: From Marin to the Golden Gate

I just finished this piece which is based on a pattern design concept that I worked on with Jean Parsons at Iowa State University. The photography began with a shot that I took while driving through the 'Rainbow Tunnel' from Sausalito to San Francisco.

The idea behind this series of pieces is that the are wearable, but also wall pieces; they are tied to a specific place conceptually. The jacket has zippers under the arm and up the side seam which can be unzipped and then re-zipped to the backdrop fabric that has a corresponding image.

CRM Fingerprint

The kimono that I was creating for the Kimono Mackintosh event ended up being called "CRM Fingerprint" because one of the prints I used in the design had remnants of a smudged fingerprint from the original hand-painted sketch that Charles Rennie Mackintosh had made. The kimono is reversible, with the outside being inspired from a variety of his designs for textiles (from the ones held in the Hunterian Art Gallery and Museum Archive (http://www.huntsearch.gla.ac.uk/Mackintosh/index.html) and was a lead-in design for the exhibition that I am designing/coordinating for the Centre for Advanced Textiles (CAT) (http://www.centreforadvancedtextiles.com) to be installed at the Hunterian from September 5 - December 5, 2008 (http://www.hunterian.gla.ac.uk:443/museum/whatsOnItem.php?item=202).

I won the competition! The prize was free flights from London to Tokyo. :) Now I really need to figure out when to go and what to see. Here are photos of the piece:













I am also traveling to Barcelona to present at the Protextile Digital conference in mid-June; and then will be going to China to be a visiting professor at the Beijing Institute for Fashion Technology during the last part of June.

This marks the beginning...

Herein lies the first post created for the Digital Textile Design blog site. I will start with an attempt at uploading some of my recent artwork.  The piece shown is called "Oops, Sorry" and will be on display in the "Wearable Expressions" juried exhibition in Palos Verdes, California from 22nd February - 13th April, 2008.

This piece is called "Moving Through".  Both this and Oops, Sorry can be displayed flat or worn on the body.

I am currently working on a new kimono design for the "Japanese Culture Society and the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society" kimono competition in Glasgow, Scotland, so posts of those designs should come soon.