Day 5

End of the first week. Since I won't be going in to the school over the weekend, I may not be posting. But that does not mean that I won't be working on following up all the resources I have discovered this week.

Today was a good day. A woman appeared with yarn to sell at the workshop. Turned out she was a grad student in the area of "textile culture". I had seen that you could get an MA in that, but didn't really understand what it was, really. Still don't. But I now know more than I did and I know that to do the degree part time would not cost a huge amount (thogh twice what a year at the Fashion Insittute of Technology did) and would only take one day a week, so could be done while still working. (Totally impossible with the one-year program at FIT which had me working dawn to midnight six days a week or more.)

She works in environmental textiles, choosing purposefully materials that degrade. I got to thinking about that. One thing I know in relation to women's artwork versus men's artwork is that there is less of women's work in museums. And that's partly because women tend to make useful things that are meant to "give" when in contact with the human body. They wear, not the body, and eventually wear out. So there is just less remaining of women's art of a given period.

The result of this thinking for me is that I now have a reason for working with non-degradable materials, because I want my artwork to be around for a good long while. It's a good reason to work in silk, which lasts for a long time, but even silk degrades. I may do some research on what materials a fiber artist could work in that would last the longest.

I also looked at some magazines and found some great resources that I want to track down on the web: www.twistedthread.com, which will be at the Knit and Stitch show this weekend. Wish I was going, but I don't dare. I could spend an absolute fortune at such a show.

I read about a company called Cred that specializes in ethical jewelry materials.

And I finally figured out an interesting way to use something I've been fanacizing about using for some time. You know those light-conducting fibers? Well, I want to use them in a fabric as well as a yarn treated with light-reactive dye. then input light and see what happens.