Fabric Workshop at the Museums Collection Centre

This week's meeting took place at the Museums Collection Centre in Nechells and was an opportunity to get to grips with a wide variety of fabric in the run up to the exhibition.  This particular workshop included wax prints designed and made in the United Kingdom, West Africa, and in the Netherlands.  This meant that we could finally get our hands on some Vlisco amongst a myriad of other styles and makes of cloth.  

During the second part of the meeting we were able to rifle through a clothes hanger full of clothes made with the pieces of cloth we had previously been handling.  The top below is a particular complicated piece, the bold blue and while print embellished with a sheer electric blue material and pearls:

Viewing handmade clothes like this helped focus our attention on what sort of clothing items we would like to have displayed in the exhibition, if at all.  We were also given an opportunity to flick through some magazines featuring recent African fashion house campaigns in order to get some inspiration:

During the final part of our workshop, we accompanied Adam to the temperature controlled warehouse where the special collections are housed, photographed and restored.  Here we were able to view some Yoruba adire cloth.  This particular style of West African cloth is my favourite; wax is melted on to the plain fabric, before being immersed in a special indigo dye, best produced by the Yoruba tribe of Nigeria.  The result? Fabulously complicated and individual two-tonal designs on vast sheets of fabric: