Brighton, England-based textile artist Kate Jenkins has been recreating veggies, seafood, and other favorite foods in wool for the last 12 years. Jenkins got her start in knitwear design, but has begun to focus on knitting feasts rather than fashions. In 2015 Jenkins made her largest installation to date, crocheting dozens of sardines, mussels, clams, shrimp, prawns, lobsters, crabs and other delights from the sea for a full-size fish counter titled “Kate’s Place” at the Knitting and Stitching Show in Dublin. For inspiration Jenkins knits or crochets from life, always purchasing the food she plans on recreating for accurate scale and texture.
Saturday (third Saturday in March) was National Quilting Day. What was I doing?
My stay-at-home recovery time from knee surgery has given me the opportunity to pick up a hand-quilting project that has been hanging around for a while. It is a block of the month quilt with quotations that I like in the “signature” areas. There is still a lot of border to finish, but now I can see that completion may actually happen. It is nice to sit with the quilt on my lab as I sew. Cmdr. Sam Vimes likes to supervise.
Seattle-based pie baker Lauren Ko has a multitude of non-edible inspirations that influence her creative pastry designs, including textile patterns, architecture, and string art. These elements are woven into her colorful, and often geometric, fruit pies and tarts topped with thin, undulating strips of apples, precisely placed pomegranate seeds, and triangles of radiating strawberries. Often Ko will color a portion of her dough with natural food dyes like beet butter to add even more color to the finished dessert. You can learn step-by-step instructions for how Ko creates her enticing sweets in this video made by Tasty, and follow the evolution of her pies on Instagram.
The Embroidered Computer by Irene Posch and Ebru Kurbak doesn’t look like what you might expect when you think of a computer. Instead, the work looks like an elegantly embroidered textile, complete with glass and magnetic beads and a meandering pattern of copper wire. The materials have conductive properties which are arranged in specific patterns to create electronic functions. Gold pieces on top of the magnetic beads flip depending on the program, switching sides as different signals are channeled through the embroidered work.
“Traditionally purely decorative, [the work’s patterns] defines their function,” explained Posch on her website. “They lay bare core digital routines usually hidden in black boxes. Users are invited to interact with the piece in programming the textile to compute for them.”
The piece is a reference to the historic similarity between textile creation and computing, for example the Jacquard loom being an important influence on the evolution of computing hardware. Posch is a researcher and artist with a background in media and computer science who explores the how technological seeps into the fields of art and craft, and Kurbak is an artist and designer who investigates the hidden politics of everyday spaces and routines. You can learn more about their work and partnerships here or here.
Amber Cowan is an artist working in glass to create fantastic, imaginary worlds. She combines found vintage glass pieces with flame-worked elements to realize her creations. I think glass is intrinsically lovely and her attention to color and texture is fascinating.
