Hi! The phone call is for John. I'll take you around for the next stage of our virtual tour.

You must have noticed lots of pattern books and pamphlets in the fabric arts areas of the Studio. Machine knitting was very popular twenty years ago. There were magazines, books and some of the earliest home computer patterning. It's much quieter now but there is a lot of useful pattern and knowledge in the older materials. We probably have the largest collection on the Island and one of the largest in the country. Although some of the collection is in Japanese, their material is well illustrated and there are translation keys for the pattern symbols.

Then there are all the books on weaving, hand knitting, quilting, embroidery and sewing. Most of them come from John's mother's working collection. The dress making publications go back to when she ran her own home business in the early 1950's. The styles from that period are important to us. Go to the Studio Look section of the website and you can see how we arrived at our basic women's outerware design.

In a few cases, such as the fabric painting stencils we produced for the residents' crafts program in the long term care units at the Saanich Peninsula Hospital, we will reproduce a design directly from patterns in the public domain. In all other cases we search our stock of patterns or images for inspiration and work up the presentation in the Studio.

It makes very little difference whether the idea for a pattern motif started from a fabric print, a needlework pattern, a photograph, a stained glass window or a classic painting.    Top

One time the requirement was a sprig of plum blossom flowers. John has hundreds of photos of real plum blossoms - that's easy to do here in the Victoria area, megabytes of images of plum blossoms in art and illustration and rolls of his own plum blossom drawings from every angle, in different styles. This design approach lets us fit the motif to the occasion. We also get very good at recognizing a cliché when we see it.

John's father was a good photographer and left us his collection of photos going back to before the last war. In most cases the negatives survive as well. We take a lot of photographs, film and digital, ourselves. Even in the days of film cameras we took photos on the theory that travel is expensive, memory fades and film is cheap. As a result we have literally thousands of images from Europe, China and all over Canada and the USA. There are kids and pets and houses and Christmas mornings of course. But there are also hundreds of images of the mountains along the Li River and walks on the Huang Shan in China.

Finally, there are the standard references. In about fifty feet of shelf space and thirty gigabytes of, well backed up, disk storage we have a good collection of Western and Oriental imagery and critical commentary for the period 1750 to 1950. We have concentrated on printed illustration and fabric design styles but there are relics of all sorts of old enthusiasms. I'm not sure how John's collection of poetry, mostly English and Chinese, fits into the Studio project but he says that he suspects that the Pastoral and the Romantic moods are like the yin and yang of good design - whatever that means.    Top