two amazing fabrics and their creators

I’ve seen two things in the last two days that I wanted to share with you.

Over the past week or so, The Reader and I have been watching Kevin McCloud’s “Man Made Home” Series 2. In this show, Kevin moves the mobile cabin that he made in the first series to the seaside. He sets it up for the new location, then goes about making the little extras to go with it. One of these things is a parka based on native Alaskan parkas made of seal gut. Kevin didn’t have seal gut on hand, so he and his mate went to a local abattoir and got themselves some pig gut. Kevin worked with Shellie Holden to create the garment. The most amazing thing was that the “fabric” they made from the pig gut actually looked beautiful! It was papery thin, had a lovely crinkle to it, and apparently was extremely strong. It just wasn’t waterproof as Kevin had hoped!

You can read more about it on Shellie’s blog, where she also has lots of photos.

The other thing that I wanted to share with you is another video about Bevilacqua, the weavers I visited in Venice and wrote about for Inspirations magazine. Such lovely fabrics, and it was really enjoyable to spend some time there, learning about the process of making the fabric. The video is in Italian, but even if you can’t understand the words, you can appreciate the pictures.

For those reading this as an email: Videos generally don’t embed in the email version of White Threads posts, so you can view it either at the blog (click on the header at the top of this post) or at YouTube.