Textiles Along The Silk Road: A Lecture & Slide Show Part 1 of 2

 

Getting ready to board the ferry

on a very Spring like day in 'paradise'.

This past Saturday The San Juan County Textile Guild held their meeting on most favorite of all islands - Shaw Island. Some of you may remember that I raved about Shaw Island last June when my friend Janet and I took a natural dyeing workshop with Joan Morris. The Community Center on Shaw is perfection. The perfect place for a meeting, workshop, lecture, dance or general get-together. It is, to my way of thinking, precisely what a community center should look like and function as. The fun part about these meetings is that the ferry makes a circuit - making it plausible for Guild members from all of the islands to attend the meeting....and leave at the same time. The local ferry takes us from our Island, San Juan Island, to Orcas Island and then onto Shaw. The reverse run goes from Shaw to Orcas and home to San Juan. 

We were fortunate to have a lecture and slide show about textiles along the Silk Road - presented by a lovely and knowledgeable woman named Joan Christoffersen. I had never thought that the idea of a Sil Road tour held much appeal to me - but after this slide show I have changed my mind - and would love to one day be able to see these amazing sites and textiles.

  

Gathering place: the ferry terminal on San Juan Island

Being able to visit Shaw Island again at this time of year gave me an opportunity to visit my "favorite" trees at the community center. The paperbark birches were just beginning to bud and I carefully took my small allotment of bark home with me. Such beautiful trees!

  

  

This is a book that Joan had brought for reference .

  

Here is a map of the Silk Road - 

Joan's commentary covered most all of these exotic locations

This dress, that Joan thought was most likely

made for the tourist trade, fascinated me. 

I wanted to get my hands on some of these fabuous medallions!

  

  

Hats seem to be the 'big' thing - each area has a slightly different version

and all of the men, in all of the areas,always wears a hat.

  

The hat below is a special one -

it's old and displays the most amazing array of fine needlework! 

The second photograph is the colorful top of the hat.

Come back to have a look at more amazing textiles tomorrow.