Coming up this time on, rocks!

A creative introduction to what marvels can be achieved given fabric, needle and thread.

A woman who's committed to the ancient process of hand spinning, and a trip to New York's Fashion Week to marvel at the latest looks taking shape.

These stories up next on Art rocks.

West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPB, offering diverse exhibitions throughout the year and programs that showcase art, history, music, and more.

West Baton Rouge Museum culture cultivated Art rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.

Hello.

Thank you for joining us for Art rocks with me, James Fox Smith from Country Roads magazine, the creative crafts of hand making clothing and quilts have largely become relics of a bygone age, but these are skill sets.

Louisiana needle worker Dorothy Williams has been cultivating all her life.

Now in her 90s, Williams derives just as much satisfaction and pleasure from hand making quilts today as she did as a child.

I was four and a half when I started sewing.

My mother let me make doll clothes.

Don't know that I like tricks.

Sewing machine.

Before I went to school, my mother was a beautiful seamstress.

She taught me and when I took home back in high school, the teacher left me alone because she said I already knew what she could teach me.

My father was a methodist minister and they were four children.

The four of us were depression, children and money was tight.

I have a sister 20 months older than I am and we shared clothes when we got to be teenagers, I got teased because people said I had on her clothes.

My mother said she would find money to buy fabric so I could make my own clothes, and I was probably 1213.

I've been sewing ever since I was a home ec major at Tech.

I have a B.A.

and a B.S.

in Home EC from tech.

After I graduated, I went and taught Home EC in Junction City, Arkansas for a year and married.

And at Christmas the next year, I was expecting my older son and that was the end of my teaching home EC, but I continued to sew.

I made my always matching outfits.

They were two years apart.

I smart for my grandson's.

I even sewed for my sister.

I've had a wonderful life with my sewing.

My husband and I went to Atlanta to see a Picasso exhibit, and this is the book.

I didn't have any better sense than to say if Picasso could paint it, I could put it in fabric, which I did, and it took four and a half months about fabric from Florida to Sacramento to put in that garment, to be sure, it was an exact replica of his painting, and it's still my favorite garment I've ever made.

I was in a bakery in Milton, Florida, and the owner of the bakery, Little Boy, was sitting there, and he had a dinosaur book, and the dinosaurs were colorful.

And so I went over and talked to him.

And paleontologists now think that dinosaurs were colorful.

They made the book, and I thought, I can put these dinosaurs in a garment.

So there are 18 or 19 dinosaur colors.

Colorful dinosaurs.

I found the skirt.

I put the name on them so it would be educational because I was the teacher for some reason, I decided to put the tree and the archaea picnic on my shoulder, snapping on their shoulder.

And it's more art costume than it is wearable art.

But it was fun to make up with the dinosaur was in their natural habitat.

It was just fun.

I believe in having fun.

The quilt show in Paducah, Kentucky is well known and the year I decided to make a garment the theme was diamonds and asphalt.

Just making a garment with diamonds would be boring, so I thought I'd make a baseball suit with a diamond on it.

So the baseball suit has a field with pliers.

It even has embroidery thread as their shoe laces on their shoes.

Out of Otis way.

And then my team diamonds are back a capital R, I put 64 enthusiastic fans in the stands and they were hand replicated and hand embroidered.

And I put my quilting friends from Florida in the stands, which was fun.

I found some buttons for gloves and and balls and bats.

This type of thing.

A friend in Florida needed the neck curve for me.

I put many baseballs with the red stitching.

Sets it was.

Diamonds are back.

I thought it needed a diamond back on it, so I put a three dimensional diamond back on the sleeve and the tail has red letters, beads for red letters, and the head is three dimensional with its tongue out.

The finds out.

And my husband did not like my snake, and I said, if I don't like it and get over it, it stay in there.

And it did.

Now this garment is something the man love.

I took white flannel for the pants and stitched the purple stripe on them so it would be authentic.

And when I modeled it in Paducah, I was still classed as an amateur.

I sat down while the judges decided who would win and turned my cuffs in, and there were safety pins held in the elastic.

And I thought, well, so much for winning a prize.

But when they announce the prize, I won first place in the amateur division for my beds, but also during this time period I was asked to teach at the International Sewing Jail in Dallas, Texas and I taught 4 or 5 classes of my technique in Dallas.

I showed some of my garments there and then.

I was also asked to design for the Houston Quilt Show, the Bernina Fashion Show, and that's when I made the silk garment with the fabrics.

It's ivory with maybe 150 and white flowers cascading down the sleeve.

That skirt that garment started with a sleeveless for this pattern, and I had to dress the skirt in the sleeves in it.

I decided to make it two layered, so I have Off-White in ecru.

The peony silk is what that garment is.

I got a memo from a paint store.

I don't know, wallpaper pattern.

You can order a memo and it's larger and I have a lightbox.

I cut out my pieces to my garment, put it on the light, the box traced the design, and then I machine stitch the fine design on the fabric before I put the garment together.

I had seen a book with flowers in it and I thought, I can do that.

So I made, oh, numerous different flowers and played in change them, and had the garment on a mannequin so I could place the flowers on the garment.

It has bead work.

It has some paintings on the flowers, has leaves with the center vine stitched around the leaves, and it just sort of flattened itself.

But I've never worn it because where would you wear something like that?

If I wore to a wedding?

I made out jam the bride.

The board behind you is a sample of my Goliath.

How to make Flowers?

I think my flowers aren't unique, because when I was making a forsythia, I got a forsythia and looked at the bloom and tried to make it look exactly like the real flower.

And the pansies have a bead in painting the hydrangeas in leaves.

You will see a denim jacket in dress, matching outfits that have an original technique on them.

There is a very old timey quilting technique called Grandmother's Flower Garden, and it's difficult to make.

It's a hexagon.

So you have all these seems to join, and I decided to make Dorothy's flower garden and use this technique on a dress I made.

And it's the panel at the front of the dress that has Dorothy's flower garden.

And it is a purchase code that I put a panel with this technique on the back of the jacket.

That is what she called a crazy quilt.

I made the crazy quilt squares and then I stitch on my machine the design at every same.

I started out making standard quilts.

I branched out from patterns to doing my own thing.

Now, even if I used a pattern, I would make changes.

That was a pattern by Jean King.

Well, who is an Australian quilter and the pattern was girl next door.

Well, my friend Madeline Walker, we quilt three of us quilt on Saturdays at her house and she and I both made the quilt.

Well, we got to the houses and the chimney.

The house on the pattern was slanted and we got tired of making that many houses with the slanted chimney.

So we had made another quilt that had houses around the border.

So I said, why don't we make some of the houses like these other?

They're easier.

So we did.

And then we still had a lot of houses to make.

So I said, why don't we put trees between the houses?

The trees are easy.

So we did that.

Well, about that time I was reading a book about foster children and the parents and the children involved.

So I renamed my quilt all the Children Are Home because that was the name of the book.

That I. I decided I would make some of my nieces in my bathroom.

I call it an art gallery.

Now apartments and art gallery.

I have two hand application pieces that I had professionally framed everything.

I have a story, and that's just who I am.

I think of it as having the opportunity to put my faults in designs and fabric, and it's not up to me if people appreciate them.

It's the satisfaction I have gotten in using what talent God has given me.

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Not only are some people committed to preserving the delicate work of sewing handmade clothing and quilts, some work to perpetuate the fine art of spinning and weaving bespoke fabrics themselves.

So let's go now to upstate New York to learn folklorist and contemporary hand spinner Matilda Lynn's story.

And what it's doing is it's building up twist.

The process of weaving starts with spinning prepared fiber.

Scratch that.

The process actually starts with carding, a task that uses boards to separate individual fibers to produce a continue US web suitable for spinning.

This is where fiber artist Matilda Lind begins, with 100 year old cards that she obtained in Europe.

Last bit I'm going to scrape off one, scrape off the other.

Then she drops her spinning wheel and spins her way to a usable fiber for the next step, weaving on a floor loom.

Her tools are traditional, one of her spinning wheels dating back to 1789, which speaks to the deep cultural significance of weaving in other cultures.

I really like the types of weaving that have deep cultural roots in everyday life.

So, you know, I think that textiles are really exciting as a craft material.

Because of all the materials in your world, this is the one that you're most intimately familiar with.

You spend every day wearing clothes.

You spend every day enveloped in textiles, and at night you're laying on textiles.

When you sit on a couch, you're usually sitting on textiles.

You know, you're just constantly touching cloth.

And when these things were all handmade, still, that meant that you spent all day long in physical contact with handmade things.

Contrary to popular belief, weaving doesn't just happen here.

It can be done with other tools, much smaller ones, which are perfect for beginners.

My smallest, simplest loom is this, it's just a little wooden pedal and you run strings through it, tie them off to a point, and then you just have to hold them taut and you can pass another string through and make a very simple band.

My inspiration, when I'm weaving it really comes from traditional textiles.

I, I do love some of the modern experimental ones, but really I just find traditional textiles to be an endless wealth of inspiration.

I spent about four years in northeastern Europe, in Estonia, and one of the things that I loved about being there was, going through the museum textiles, and there was just an endless, variety of color palettes and, structures and also like embellishments, like embroidered details and edge finishes and all these little bits and pieces that made their, their textiles so rich and so beautiful.

As with any artist beginning and even with the quite seasoned mistakes happen, the good news is when they do.

Working with fibers makes undoing the mistake quite easy.

The goal is to go places with your art that might scare you just a little bit.

Sometimes I do take risks when creating new pieces.

I think that you just kind of have to.

It's a really important part of any artist process to fail sometimes.

And, you shouldn't be afraid of failure.

One of the nice things about weaving also is you can really easily take apart your fabric and reuse all of that material, so there's no loss, even if you use like, really expensive material and a lot of it, you can undo it for the most part.

Matilda is passionate about her art and love, sharing her knowledge with others.

As the Director of Programs and Research at Tawney, or Traditional Arts in upstate New York, she gets the opportunity quite often, not just with curious customers at Tawney, but with interested artists in local communities.

I think that weaving is a really important thing to show people, especially young people, but communities in general, because we've really lost the awareness of how fabric is made.

And, you know, as I was saying before, we're draped in it every day.

We wear fabric every day, and most people don't know how it works.

So when you're out there in public as a weaver and you're showing, yes, I can make this fabric by hand and look at how fabulous it is.

It puts people back in touch with something that is an essential part of our common human heritage.

This is one of the most time consuming things that we did as human beings.

For thousands of years, was producing the cloth that we needed for everyday life, and somehow, suddenly, we're all totally unfamiliar with it.

So it's so important for us, especially with young people, to bring the weaving out into the public, to show them how it works and help them to kind of reclaim that part of what it is to be a human in the world.

If this deeply cultural craft interests you, here's what this artist says you should do to get started.

If you're an artist and you want to learn how to weave, usually there is some sort of weaving group near you.

I would start out by contacting them and see if you can have an opportunity to use a loom before you actually invest in one.

After you've done that, then I would say, start looking around on, like used furniture listings.

So you'll find some looms out there and they're really, really big.

So most people end up selling them for not too much money.

So you can find a really beautiful old loom that works really well, for not too much of an investment.

And that's how I would start out.

You can get a folding loom if you don't have a lot of space.

So that can fold up against a wall and be fairly, you know, easy to store.

Or you can get a table loom as well.

So there are a lot of ways to get started.

But I would say, you know, first thing you want to do is reach out to your community.

Acolytes of the great fashion houses of Paris, New York and Milan wait all year to see what fabulous new style innovations the new season brings.

And there's no time like New York's Fashion Week to find out what America's great designers are rolling out for the New Year.

So let's take a sneak peek at some brand new looks emerging from America's established icons of haute couture, and a few from the up and comers to.

Its classic Americana, and it's its future meeting traditionalism.

And I love that esthetic.

I love when there's a balance afoot in the past and a foot in the future.

And Ralph does that better than anyone.

American fashion is scrappy.

We don't have an LVMH or a Richmond or a Carrick.

We're a network of independent brands, right?

We don't have this big conglomerate.

There is also a real entry into American fashion that's probably a little bit easier than other fashion capitals Paris, Milan, London because of the entrepreneurial American spirit, right?

If you've got a good idea and you're driven and you put forth the energy and the commitment to it, you can make it.

We have our iconic designers Tory, Michael Koch, Tommy Hilfiger, Carolina Herrera, West Gordon, Ralph last night.

These are really quintessential American ranch.

And they really anchor the week, New York Fashion Week and CFDa, as well as the official organizer of New York Fashion Week to the World.

You know, Ralph is aspirational.

He's classically American.

Everything you love about American tailoring to feel effortlessly luxurious.

And whether it's in New York City and, you know, and you're wearing some, you know, just to persuade boots or whether it's out in the Hamptons and you're wearing some blue jean, he's like, you know, you can wear stuff anywhere.

This season, we'll see a lot of CFDa Vogue fashion fun designers on the schedule.

It was just such an amazing first show.

It went better than I could have imagined.

The energy from the team and the the brand, the coming through and having this different point of view of not growing up in fashion and getting into it just a couple of years ago, I didn't have this kind of preconceived idea of how things had to be done or even how the industry worked.

And so I think just winging it and doing it, how I want and how I think is right, and as well, because it's all very organic.

There's a playfulness that you see with her accessories.

There's something amazing in using metallic materials, but they flow like water.

It felt like a breath, a breath of fresh air for sure, and very like glowy and sunshiny, you know, like the room just goes bright and I feel like all day has just been very happy.

It was very elegant and intimate and nice, and I was actually honestly super impressed with the designs and the wearability.

But also there felt like a very clear brand.

I didn't even know that was our first show.

It was a great first show and I'm excited to see where she goes from here.

We've got such great representation from underrepresented communities.

About half the brands are led by a woman, and you don't really see that same level of diversity in other cities, because that is really the thread of American culture and New York City, and this is the culture.

This is fashion.

I love the energy of New York.

Even though I'm a Florida girl.

I love being here.

There's no place like New York.

I love that any time that you just walking on the street, you just get to, like, feel all the fashion, energy and that people really, really, really like and enjoy fashion here.

Look out here.

You see so many different people, so many different walks of life, so many different cultures all coming together.

I think it's all art.

The one thing we can do as artists that limits us the most is decide we are one thing or another.

You know, I absolutely love fashion because I feel like it's a total it's a complete experience.

I think it's immersive.

I think it transports you in a that group contains someone who's who's really starting out doing so great and then is able to build a legacy brand.

Prior to that, there were so many decades, and in doing so, define as the culture of this country that we live in.

And I think it's really, really, really important.

And that is that for this edition of Art rocks, each episode showcases the work of a Louisiana artist, and you can find every one of those segments archived online at LPB.

Dot org slash art rocks.

And if stories like this enrich your world, consider subscribing to Country Roads magazine.

It's a vital guide for learning what's shaping Louisiana's cultural life all across this state.

Until next week, I've been James Fox Smith and thanks to you for watching.

West Baton Rouge Museum is proud to provide local support for this program on LPB, offering diverse exhibitions throughout the year and programs that showcase art, history, music, and more.

West Baton Rouge Museum culture cultivated Art rocks is made possible by the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting and by viewers like you.