CELEBRATING THE FIBERS OF OUR LIVES
Welcome to TEXTILE GEMS REIMAGINED—our playful and interactive blog about vintage and unique textiles from around the world (or your grandmother’s closet!) and especially, showcasing lovely and fun options for their creative re-purposing.
What We Do
We collect a great many vintage textile treasures, and show how even very imperfect textiles or garments from a local flea market, your travels, or the internet, can become stylish artistry for your wardrobe, or add striking and soulful décor to your home. Japanese kimono textiles are one of the most frequent categories of textiles we collect. Below, from left to right are favorite selections from our studio stash: vintage Japanese kimono textiles, vintage tribal textiles from multiple cultures, and vintage Indian sari textiles.
Since 2003, our “regular business” TEXTILE GEMS™ has been primarily focused on creating jewelry from vintage ethnic textiles for wholesale to museum clients. However, we are recently more and more enjoying our involvement with recycling gorgeous but imperfect textiles for wearables and home décor, for both small runs for clients and custom one-off creations.
We love the serendipitous charm of unique or handmade vintage garments and textiles for their evocative designs and artistic techniques (detailed weaving and needlework, hand dyeing, hand painting, etc.) Ethnic and tribal textiles are some of our most favorite worlds, and currently highly popular.
Our Blog Welcomes Information-Sharing
We hope the visuals on our blog will enhance your appreciation of everyday accessible textile beauty—in both older textiles still to be found, and in contemporary textiles traditionally created or inspired. We are all—often without our taking notice—constantly surrounded by historical and international design motifs in our everyday lives. Our retail fashion world, home décor trends, restaurant décor, entertainment, and of course–our museum experiences –are filled with exuberant and lively stimulation from all cultures and corners of the world.
Now that many beautiful old textiles and exquisite handmade garments are rarely or infrequently found, we are happy to be a forum for information-sharing on some still-accessible traditional textile artistry. So whether you are a textile collector, textile artist, or someone simply entranced by a particular textile of unique beauty, we welcome your inquiries, comments, and participation. (Please note our focus is mainly on mid-priced, charming textile artistry, so we are not a good resource for discussion of highly precious or investment quality textiles.)
Nevertheless we are always happy to connect for any textile-related topic.
