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.