Cultural Tech-Fusion Fabrics

I have found an interesting freeware tool that enables one to create a color palette from a photo.
http://www.colourlovers.com/photocopa

Below, a fusionwear sv image submission by Matthew  Ebisu is taken into this software and  I selected five colors from the available palette range. You can see my selection of five colors in the bottom row. The color palette to the right is generated by Photocopa.  I will be using this tool to define the color palettes of the digital textiles I am crating for the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles. This is one more way to integrate publicly submitted images of Silicon Valley into the textile designs.

This has a very clean interface and the website colourlovers.com has many forums, links and tools relating to color palettes...a very useful resource for any designer.

I am beginning to carefully look through the image submission to the Flickr group pool of the fusionwear sv project and am looking at images I would like to draw upon in my textiles. Since the inception of this project, I knew I wanted an aerial view of the Alviso salt ponds and Simon Phipps was gracious enough to submit his amazing photo below.

I took his photo and flipped in several directions to make a seamless tile.

Below I created a repeat tile pattern in Photoshop. I don't envision using the Study B pattern. Instead, for this fabric I envision using the above Study A pattern as a very very large print. I have learned tips on how to generate large scale prints at the very useful Spoonflower Flickr group discussion site.

Within this Study A print I will add subtle cultural motifs created in Illustrator. These will be lighter in value, but similar in hues. I envision an image scale similar to those highlighted this Wall Street Journal article (May 20, 2010): Are You Wearing a Watercolor?.

This pattern will reflect onCultures reaching in and reaching out. Cultural motifs are structured within graphic patterns referencing aerial views of salt ponds and containing ponds of the Bay. Salt ponds and electronic waste ponds isolate water born compounds and concentrate them. These ponds can serve as a metaphor for how cultures blend and do not blend in Silicon Valley. In Santa Clara as elsewhere, cultures are sometimes isolated into neighborhoods, concentrating an ethnic group apart from the broader community. When these walls break down, when people move in and out of enclaves, blending begins. Public schools and work places are locations of much of this cultural interchange and blending here in Silicon Valley. Sections of the fabric will show cultural motifs contained in walled forms and sections of fabric will show the breaking of walled forms and the blending of various cultural elements swirling together in a larger area.

Not all of my textiles will incorporate photos in this way. From some images I will extract small element by sketching them on paper, scanning, rendering in Illustrator and then taking them into Photoshop to create the pattern.  I will have samples of this process soon and will detail all source images and components in the Museum display signage.

It was a good idea on paper, but adding in the cultural motifs dilutes the image too much. I think I will be sticking to just using the image tiled.

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).

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.

Last week I visited the Al-Huda Bookstore and Hijab Corner in Santa Clara to photograph their rich textiles and garments. The store graciously permitted me to photograph.

Women wearing hijabs and flowing long abayas are part of our textile landscape  in Santa Clara County. At my son and daughter's school in Cupertino I am often admiring the lovely  scarf and dress ensembles of the Muslim moms. I have yet to ask one if I can photograph her, though. While I find it only a little awkward asking a Chinese or an Indian mom to photograph her in her ethnic clothing, I find it much more difficult to approach a Muslim mom and ask to photograph her clothing. I think this has much to do with the fact that their clothing is rooted in the desire to be modest.

So, I was grateful to have the opportunity to photograph up close the garments in Hijab Corner. I will also be photographing Middle Eastern Muslim women on the streets as part of this project (I have a few images of one in a Korean market in Sunnyvale). I feel it is important to document the living textiles, the garments people wear about in their daily lives. But this was a good start for me.

I had never thought of the flat pattern designs of the hijab, nor did I know there were so many versions of this head wear.  The above is a simple flat pattern design. Some of the others were more more complex and used a variety of materials in one hijab.

The gold embroidered headband is a separate piece.

Above: I wish I could have seen this one on someone. I liked the contrast between the white open dot fabric and the solid black fabric.

Having spent the early part of my career as a graphic designer, I am very interested in packaging. The graphics on hijab packaging need to appeal to women as they are the  purchasers of this garment. So it is interesting to see these two depictions of women on hijab packaging.

Most of these garments above are made in Pakistan and Jordan. The embroidery is really interesting.  Feeling the weight of the fabric, I couldn't help thinking that it would be quite hot wearing these here in the summer, let alone in the heat of the Middle East.

Above: I never knew that this product existed.  In Cupertino I have seen white arm  sleeves on Chinese women who want to protect themselves  from the sun, but these arm sleeves serve to protect the arms from public view.  I don't believe I have seen anyone wearing these.

Below is a sample pattern banner which might be used in press release info for the public collaborative textile project with the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles.

I have three jeans to mend. A few days ago I mended one of my daughter's using scraps of denim and sashiko stitching.

Below: My grandma sewed these mu mus below. I used to wear these myself when I was in high school. I photographed them recently at my parents' house. The stitch work strengthens the fabric and is very decorative. It is not sashiko, but it is traditional Japanese stitch work. I do not know what it is called. I recognize the star like pattern from other Japanese soft goods like pillows.  The linking stitch work I have seen on other worker garments. I just found this posting on Japanese darning on Hand Embroidery Network and think such darning is the origins of this decorative yoke. I also found this article showing Japanese stitching and darning.

I have been working with Rasteriods Design in San Jose on creating the logo for the ZERO1 textile project with The San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles. Rasteriods came up with the microsite name "Fusionwear SV" for the project. They also created a series of type studies with the name. Pulling from these studies I created this concept below which incorporated a few more graphical elements. It is hard to see here, but I added a dotted line path into the text which alludes to stitching, to topography lines and to paths. I pulled "wear" down and had it link to the "O" in fusion to create a focal point. I added a dot over the "i" to counter balance the dot in the "O".  Anyway, we will see tomorrow what the museum thinks of our studies.

Below is a quick study I did for how we might pull visual elements from logo into site map design. The green dots on the branching green stalk would show links upon roll over.

OPPORTUNITY AND CHALLENGE:
Creating a public participatory component to the ZERO1 NEA funded textile project is an exciting challenge. Assuming we get a lot of image submissions to the Flickr Group pool we create, how will I pull inspiration from these and form coherent patterns on textiles? That is the key question.  It could be a horrid jumble  if I do not start visualizing now an over arching structure to the design. The whole project could soar or fail spectacularly!

I am fortunate to have great sounding boards in the artists friends and family around me. Diana Agrabrite of the Euphrat Museum recently spent a few hours reviewing my Creative Work Fund application and the ZERO1 textile project concepts.  She challenge me to think of where cultural blending is and is not happening in the community and challenged me to find ways of expressing that in the textile design of the Creative Work Fund project application. Today I spent an hour talking with my sister, designer Lisa Whitsitt, brainstorming on the structuring of the ZERO1 textile project. I am so grateful for Diana's and Lisa's expert advise.

My sister suggested that I create a cleantheme tying all the textiles together.She referred me to a great project called Medical Herbman Cafe.  The project is a simple concept, it is easily explained and all components are seamlessly integrated and planned clearly from the beginning.

Since I was already visualizing abstracting topography elements (bird's eye view of Bay salt ponds) as a overlying structure on one of the textiles referencing both cultural blending and isolation, she suggested that I used land mapping as the super structure bringing all the imagery together into a coherent framework.

Perhaps each of the five textiles represents a different environment zone... mirroring tangible space for a place, Silicon Valley, with no real physical boundaries:
1. Fertile land burred under concrete
2.The Bay
3. Sky
4. Mountains
5. Low bay lands

 I can work with the visual vocabulary of topography maps, timelines and maps of all sorts. This approach references back to the idea of data collection and the art of visually making sense of data. How do the images and stories that the public contribute fit into the the land? What is the interplay between the people and the land and how is the interplay expressed in patterns?

INFORMATION GRAPHICS is a specialize field of design that represents raw data into some sort of visual order. Visual order and rhythm is what I am aiming for with my textiles. The textiles need to tell a story within a meaningful structured design. There is much inspiration to be taken from information design and perhaps much to be adapted for textile design.  Smashing Magazine has good info in information graphic mapping of information. The best site I have found for visual information is Visual Complexity. I have learned a lot from this site. I am trying to figure out how to get Synesketch on my website. It is a fascinating tool that visually represent mood expressed in written text. As the site states it is the "Web's first free open-source textual emotion recognition and visualization engine."
I can easily imagine the resulting patterns as digital embroidery motifs. For my ZERO1 textile project I will ask participants to submit statements on how they feel about Silicon Valley and then I will copy statements into application to generate images and then hopefully get the designs recreated in digital embroidery.

In my web hunting I found this great site, Aharef,  (Web pages as graphs ) which has an applet that turns websites into graphics based upon the tagging, coding, links, etc. Below, I tested out how the applet visualized my websites: this site and my artist site and my artist blog. Here are the images. The images don't capture how the blooms emerge from one dot and the following nodes unfold on the stems. It is a beautiful tool to watch in action.