Stuff I've Made, small purse, BB Bag

This is from the BB Bags pattern by Mickey Beebe, on Tracey Brookshier's website.  I used some of my West African fabric, which I bought in Accra.  It's hard to tell but it's actually 2 complimentary fabrics.  They do a lot of that over there, lovely matching sets of fabric.

First, some pictures of the little purse I made.  Here, you see it open.  I took these pictures w/ my iphone, so they're not great pictures, but hopefully you get the idea.There are plenty of zippers & pockets. The only problem I really have with the design is that everything you are carrying must be flat!  So it's hard to put both keys, a phone & some chapstick in there all at once! 

For the closure, I had originally put on an African bead along with a string loop I attached after I'd put the binding on.  It quickly broke, but the closing loop (made of the same fabric) is still on there.  I close it now with a safety pin; not so cool.  What I really need to do is undo the binding, sew in another loop, with the bead already on it, then use the loop that's already on there to close it. I made one for my mom, too, also with other West African fabric.

Boy's caftan from Turkey

This is a small caftan which we've had hanging on the wall in our hallway.  We have hangers up all over the place with clothing on them.  Possibly a weird way to decorate, but how else will we enjoy our treasures? It's woven silk, with this amazing printed cotton lining, and lots of embroidery on the edges.  A friend borrowed it once for a Hallowe'en party; she was quite small, so it fit her beautifully.

We bought it in Nevşehir, in the Cappadocia region of Turkey.  We also bought 3 boys' hats there...but those are in storage somewhere.  I promise, after we move next week I'll get them all out for show. This page is quite a good reference if you'd like to learn more about Turkey...

One thing that's interesting about the design is that the pieces of silk are all rectangles, but to make gussets & darts, (the places where humans bend & change size), they've created those with pieces of velvet & silk, in contrasting colors.  The two top pictures show this design element pretty well, I think.

I hope you like seeing these items.  If you have any questions, let me know; we've learned a lot about textiles, weaving, embroidery, etc. as part of this hobby, and if I don't know the answer, I'm a librarian, so I can point you in the right direction...

Thanks for your interest!

Stuff I've made: Fashion lanyards, using up my bead collection

Whenever we travel I try to buy a packet of beads. So when I needed some lanyards for work, I decided to get out some of those beads and make fashion lanyards. Here are 5 I've made. I get compliments on them & now have enough that they match most of my work outfits!

Perfect music: Cold Beverage by G. Love & Special Sauce (is that the best band name ever?!) It's 100F+ today & tomorrow...and I'm not even mentioning humidity here in the DC area! So, yeah, I like cold bev-e-rage!

More from Oman

Our female students didn't like having their photos taken but we got some of our male students to show how they tie/fold their misrs.  They are quite a fashion item & worn as scarves the world over, so are readily available. Here's the page...after reading about them, click on our students' names to see how they're folded in different parts of Oman.  If you try it yourself, let me know.  Or better yet, send me a picture!

Something I made but don't have anymore :-(

When we left Istanbul (and we were in a hurry) we had to leave lots of stuff behind (sewing notions, lots of sewing notions!).  And this quilted wall-hanging, which I didn't think I'd miss, but I do and I might have to make another to replace it.  It's supposed to be a window looking out on a flower garden.  What do you think?

From the Collection - Child's top from northern Thailand

We bought this in Mae Hong Son, up in the Golden Triangle part of Thailand (near the Chinese & Burmese borders).  I'm not sure, but I think it's from the Lisu Hill Tribe, mostly because of the style of embroidery.  It's a great example of the care & expertise that goes into children's clothing.  Another thing, which you can't tell, is that the silver beads have little stones (or something) in them, so they make noise when the child is running.  Much less irritating than those children's sneakers that flash or beep each time a little boy or girl takes a step in the western world!  

From the Collection - Children's clothing from Oman

We've collected a lot of children's clothing (though we don't have children!) in our travels.  Why?  Well, this is what I think...20-30-40-50 years ago, the world must have been even more amazing than it is now:   Dutch people walking around in wooden shoes, Indonesian women in dresses made of birch bark, heavily embroidered aprons in Central Europe, woven Kente and raffia cloth in Africa, felted wool caps in Ladakh, and sealskin outfits that kept you warm but let you sweat in the northern latitudes.  Wow.  The world is still pretty amazing, but clothing is not why you go traveling anymore.  Unfortunately, in most places, traditional clothing is something you wear for a festival, a graduation ceremony, a wedding, and most other days you wear pants and a shirt or t-shirt.  (This isn't completely true; here's a brief list of great places where you can still see people going about their lives in the clothing that they've been wearing for the last 200-1,000 years:  Guatemala and southern Mexico, Indonesia, Ladakh, Bolivia and especially India and Japan.  The Persian/Arabian Gulf region is great, too, but traditional clothing is actually mandated by law in many of those countries.)  Something else we've noticed is that when traditional clothing is being worn, it's usually the women and children wearing it.  Men's couture seems to be the easiest to switch to pants and a t-shirt.  Also, children's and women's clothing is amazing because of the care and hard work that goes into decorating it.  And for us, travelling over the last 20 years, women's and children's clothing is really all that's left in antique stores.  The care, hard work and design that go into creating and decorating children's clothing also indicate how much the child was loved.  My guess is that the women doing this work had plenty of other things to do, but they spent a lot of time on these clothes anyway.

So here are a few items from the Sultanate of Oman.  There's a good clothing article with lots more photos here.  And a more authoritative article here (from the government).  The little boy's dishdashah (above) is worn all over Oman, and you see them mostly in white, though sometimes in other pastel colors.  This little girl's thawb (left), is typical of little girls all over Oman, but for adult women it's more typical of central Oman.  It would be worn with loose pants, called al basta. The embroidery on this has been done with a sewing machine.  Not that it looks any easier than doing it by hand--I've got some great examples of extremely intricate machine-stitched embroidery I'll share later.

It dawned on my this morning that you might like to see real children in these clothes.  Fortunately we took a digital camera with us when we went to Oman in 1998 and those photos are fairly easy to sort through (once I'd gone downstairs and dug out the backup hard drive).  First of all, a photo of some children in an oasis near al-Mudhaibi, which is near our favorite souq, Sinaw. The kids were overjoyed because after walking around the oasis for a while we returned to find a goat on the hood of our car!  (Goats will find any method available to get up into the trees for a good meal of leaves.)  I think this photos illustrates my earlier point: most of the boys are wearing western clothing (the only boy in a dishdashah and kuma--Omani embroidered cap--is hidden by the others)...while the girls are dressed traditionally.

But of course we have plenty of photos, so here's a nice one of a boy in a dishdashah and misr, and very cool sunglasses, taken in Sinaw.  The woman behind him is in traditional Bedu dress-up clothes.  The Bedu mostly live in the desert and only see their friends when they come to the souq (which is held weekly), so it's definitely a dress-up day.

Of course it's impossible for me to write a post about souqs in Oman without including a photo of a camel.  And this is my favorite type of camel photo--a camel in the back of a small pickup!  We saw these all over Oman (once we got out of the capitol) and I loved it; what a reminder that you're not in Kansas anymore, huh?!