Gunta Stölzl

Gunta Stölzl was a German textile artist who played a fundamental role in the development of the Bauhaus school’s weaving workshop. As the Bauhaus’s only female master she created enormous change within the weaving department as it transitioned from individual pictorial works to modern industrial designs. She joined the Bauhaus as a student in 1920, became a junior master in 1927 and a full master the next year. 

She was dismissed for political reasons in 1931, a year before the Bauhaus closed under pressure from the Nazis. The textile department was a neglected part of the Bauhaus when Ms. Stölzl began her career, and its active masters were weak on the technical aspects of textile production. She soon became a mentor to other students and reopened the Bauhaus dye studios in 1921. 

After a brief departure, Stölzl became the school's weaving director in 1925 when it relocated from Weimar to Dessau and expanded the department to increase its weaving and dyeing facilities. She applied ideas from modern art to weaving, experimented with synthetic materials, and improved the department's technical instruction to include courses in mathematics. The Bauhaus weaving workshop became one of its most successful facilities under her direction.

Text: Wikipedia, Images:  As reference from multiple websites

Ikat - The art of tying and binding

Ikat - the trend this season

Ikat is a dyeing technique used to pattern textiles that employs a resist dyeing process similar to tie-dye on either the warp or weft fibres.

Anthropologie Astrid Chair

Madeline Weinrib Luce Fabric

Bindings, which resist dye penetration, are applied to the threads in the desired patterns and the threads are dyed. Alteration of the bindings and the dyeing of more than one color produce elaborate, multicolored patterns. When all of the dyeing is finished the bindings are removed and the threads are ready to be woven into cloth.

West Elm Bliss Chair

The defining characteristic of ikat is the dyeing of patterns, by means of bindings, into the threads before cloth construction, the weaving of the fabric, takes place. Herein lies the difference between ikat and tie-dye. In tie-dye the fabric is woven first and the resist bindings are then applied to the fabric which is dyed.

In warp ikat the patterns are clearly visible in the warp threads on the loom even before the plain colored weft is introduced to produce the fabric. In weft ikat it is the weaving or weft thread that carries the dyed patterns which only appear as the weaving proceeds. In weft ikat the weaving proceeds much slower than in warp ikat as the passes of the weft must be carefully adjusted to maintain the clarity of the patterns.

Dwell Studio Diamond ikat azure pillow

Calypso St. Barths Paisely ikat rug

J. Crew Indira ikat dress

Text: Wooly Eyes
Images: Image source mentioned in the captions

Wooly Eyes

You are born bright-eyed
Wide-eyed, white
Pink bubbles, crimson trails
You open your eyes, white light

You cry, exhausted, tumbling,
Your mother's soft fur fumbling
Swollen, nervous. You survived
And now you're alive.

It's raining
Your step is toothless
Your bite untrained

You nibble on the lime green buds
Then chew the darker leaves below
You wander into the full-mooned night
Four limbs, warm, everything is alright.

Everything here is embossed with touch
You grow older, stronger is your clutch
You fall in love
Pregnant with the future, blessings from above

You love the earth, the dark cool
They remind you of the inside of your mother's belly
But you never liked water, it reminds you of the rain and your mewl.

Seasons change, its warmer now
You're ready for the new
Your wool is shaven, you are reborn
You can't change your life till you change your hair

At first you hide, then you come out to play
Swimming in heaps of hay
Childhood again, the games we used to play
It felt just like the other day

You are piles and piles of wool, let it not burn
In your joy you bring warmth, a flowing lantern
And a story of a wide-eyed, white, Return.

Text and images: Wooly Eyes
Images taken at Raj Overseas Factory, Panipat

An exercise in Relativity

Clumps of green play hide and seek with the white marble and red stone of the Humayun's Tomb as I set off from Delhi to Panipat, where the looming, dusty, blaring, peaceful, communal factories of Rugs by Raj. It takes me a moment to realize that the green and the stone are as they always were; it was me, instead, that was moving. And this sense of displacement--and re-placement--continues through the day. 

*

I'm walking--floating--through rows of men--gluing, cutting, cleaning, stitching, packing, counting, listing--and stacks and stacks of rugs--made from wool and cotton and plastic and an array of waste material: this is the finishing room. 

Floating in raw material

Something of the posters of gods and goddesses, the play of color, then the white packaging shroud that conceals the long, labored task of creating a single rug, strikes me as intensely philosophical, as the seed, the bloom, the end, and a re-creation.

I am simultaneously in myself and hovering above, realizing the distance, physical and spiritual, between those that create and those that utilize.

Hand tools made by the workers at the factory

The handmade glue, the storage of the glue in the wedge of a brick, the solidification of a handful of latex to create and eraser, the course sticks of a broom to remove extra lint, the metal creation of a flattening device, the brightly colored sari-ed women sitting amongst ceiling high piles of white yarn--like an aurora borealis in the morning: All these homemade, everyday innovations are particular to India and are interwoven into the framework of the rug. 

Brooming away the extra lint

Innovative ways to remove excess lint

The factory is like a giant human body: A brain sends messages to heart, which pumps blood through its vessels, distributed through organs, permeating each tissue, bringing alive every cell. 

Strumming music to the ears

I return to the comfort of the main office, the music of the radio and the music of the tools reverberating in my ears. I take my slippers off and the fibres tease and caress the undersides of my feet. I return, in a reverie, to the fields of sheep that leant the heaps of wool, to the women who sifted through it, sheep dust flying in the air, to the men who placed it machine after machine, until it turned the thin, rich fibre that sunk into the soapy water, that revolved on the spinning wheel, to the man in the white lab coat that dyed it multiple times, that pierced the canvas of a rug, and finally formed a pattern. A pattern that existed not only in form, color and theme, but in the hidden world of music, improvisation, and the blessings of Indian gods and goddesses. A pattern that is lain on your floor, your own story accumulating into someone else's, far away, and on your fingertips. 

Text and images by Wooly Eyes.