The BLOG

24 | Apr

Trunk Show!

Just back from India with hand-painted silk shawls, fresh cotton pillows and bedcovers, sparkly earrings, bright sarongs for the beach. Also featuring Proud Mary hand-woven cotton bags and cushions from Guatemala and new designs from Mali by Harper Poe! Email to receive an invitation and more information. May 1,2012 5-9 pm. susan@illoominata.com

24 | Apr

threads having a party

It’s all a birthday party for these pillows. Which is why people look at them and smile, and immediately think of a child who needs one for their bed. Each chorus of color, composed on a back-strap loom by a woman in the highlands of Guatemala, became a blouse, a huipile, for herself. Into it goes her village’s signature style, so that anyone on the road would know she belongs to, say, Sacatepequez, if she is striped in red and white; or Nebaj, if birds perch on her shoulder large and green. But beyond that, she brings in the earth she lives upon – the volcanos and cedars and jaguars that speak to her – and the dreams that come to her at night. The path of the sun and stars, the seasons, the double-headed eagle or Quetzal plumes, all find their way into her song. When a woman greets the day in Chichicastango, she slips into a huipile, black as night, and rises as the sun through the open neck where flames fling out like light – at the center of her life, at the center of herself. Like country music, you know the basic twang, but each new song spills forth fresh from this heartbreak, or this turf where we make home. Women in this part of the world still wear their wide and luminous world on their shoulders.

The seamstress just returned to me a room full of these happy pillows, which all together do look like a party going on down in the studio, waiting for the Trunk Show to really break out. I hear the old music in them, the river where they were weekly washed, the mountain trails they walked, the suns greeted. One still has its green velvet epaulets which are added when a woman’s mother dies.

It’s country music, for sure, the way it strums on all the chords of living. But these cloths ends up saying: it’s all a party! Every redyellowbluegreenorange has its note in the song, its place in the band, its candle on the cake. I pile on them and feel a surge. I say, now, everyday: play on.

06 | Apr

Mad for the Old Madras

Sitting on the dirt floor in Chettinad, a man is spinning colors, bright and electric. A woman is weaving them into surprising panes of prismatic

cloth, clacking away on an old wooden floor loom. A few months ago, the permanent weaving home of this small cooperative was flooded beyond use. So they started over here, from the muddy ground up, and kept on weaving the beauty they know.

I was captive to it, wanted to scoop up every palette in sarongs, saris, shawls even as they cut them off the loom.

Tying off the ends all afternoon, a tuk-tuk delivered them to my room that evening. At home, I washed the crispness out so that the colors proved steadfast, the hand soft and ready for the beach sand, or the shoulder in summer.

I remember Madras plaid as a child, how lovely it felt against the skin. This, here, is post-modern plaid. A tweaky spin on the old tradition. Fun, unexpected, a color sensibility only India could produce. And the weaver in this, an artist building a new home for her craft, flooded this time, I hope, with fortune.