Cultural Tech-Fusion Fabrics

 
 
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Textile design by Carmen Uruena Slee
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Textile design by Lisa Whistitt & Kadin Whitsitt
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Textile design by Pantea Karimi
In the process of managing the fusionwear sv site, I have come to realize that it is very helpful to walk people through the process of creating a tiling image. I have assisted three inspiration image submitters in  turning their designs/photos into textile designs. Using a combination of scanning, Photoshop and, in one case, the freeware SumoPaint, these individuals created fun textiles. This was a good learning process for me as an instructor as it gave me a trial run in teaching textile tiling using these tools; I will be conducting a free digital textile design workshop at the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles on Friday (June 4th) during the SubZero Festival.

I am also experimenting in using freeware tools to record and teach textile tiling. ScreenToaster is a great tool to recording your actions on the screen. I created one such demo, but need to play around with settings more as the resolution is very low.
Here it is posted to YouTube.
I learned about some of these tools from fellow Merit Scholar, Nicole Dalesio.
Below is a link to a wonderful video she created about the kaleidoscope filter in SumoPaint. She used ScreenToaster to record her onscreen actions.
http://vimeo.com/10759719

She is a pro at creating clean and crisp videos. I am eager to learn more from her in the Merit Program this summer at the KCI Center for Innovation.
 
I teach animation workshops in a school in Alum Rock, San Jose. I enjoy this area as there are echoes of an agricultural past along the seams. As I was leaving the school on Monday, a man clopped by on a horse.  He told me that he was out riding his son's horse and that they were members of a Mexican horse ranch from up the street. I will have to go there and visit! I did not know about it. Last year I had visited a near by egg ranch to get egg cartons for the animation classes (great for storing clay parts in sequences).

It is common to see people selling fruit out of the back of trucks, street vendors selling helado and fried pork chips and Mexican dulces from small push carts (they suddenly appear near the schools when classes end).
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strap of saddle under horse
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Tomorrow (6:30-8:30 pm) I will be conducting an image collection event at the Cupertino Community Center. This event is sponsored by the Cupertino Library as part of their Asian Heritage Month programming. People who bring a cultural garment or fabric for me to photograph will be entered to win a pair of Zazzle shoes. I will have a mannequin set up with images of my preliminary textile designs flashing across it. This visual is to aid the public in understanding the project (and hopefully will draw in people just passing by.) It won't be dark yet and I will be set up in doors, so I don't know how visible this will be.

It will be a test run for a similar mannequin set up at the SubZero Festival on June 4th at the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles. At that event I will create a digital textile lab for one evening. The public will have the opportunity to experiment with textile design on  laptops generously loaned by the Krause Center For Innovation. Visitors can create textile tiling patterns on paper, post them on an inspiration board and will also be able to vote on the public submissions for the fusionwear sv textile contest. The printing of the winning textiles will be sponsored by Spoonflower.
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This pattern above was inspired by two public sumbissions to http://fusionwearsv.sjquiltmuseum.org/