Weaving and Sewing for a conference

Donatella, Coco, and You Jacket by Judith Shangold Donatella Versace, Giorgio Armani, Coco Chanel, and Stella McCartney. Wait a minute! Fashion designers? This is supposed to be Weaving Today’s e-newsletter. Oh, but it is, and it’s your chance to be a clothing designer for an event in Europe. Väv is a Swedish weaving conference that is held every three years. Approximately 10,000 participants and between 70 and 80 vendors are expected to attend. Imagine that shopportunity! There will be exhibitions by professionals who were trained in Borås and are now employed as weavers, designers, and artists. There will also be displays of contemporary textile art and lectures from well known weavers and designers such as Ulla Cyrus. Some of the lectures will be given in English. Now if this doesn’t already have you scheming a way to get to Sweden next year, how about this? Smart textiles. This is a new wave being studied at a Swedish university that is exploring the combination of craft with technology. Väv - Swedish Conference The focus at next year’s Väv conference is clothing sewn from handwoven fabric. So here’s your chance for international acclaim: Handwoven and Väv magasinet are cosponsoring a joint runway fashion show to be held next September at the conference. We’ll be looking for five tailored and five loom-shaped garments from our readers to represent our weaving community. Whether you are an experienced seamstress who is already thinking of a one-of-a-kind dress that you will “stitch in the ditch” and press with a “tailor’s ham” or a weaver who prefers loom-shaped clothing, get your loom warped and your designing mind engaged to create your best-ever handwoven garment. Digital photos must be submitted to our website by April 1, 2011, and we will soon be posting complete information on weavingtoday.com. Because we will select the finalists from photographs, we urge you to take special care with your photography. The selected items must be sent to Handwoven, and then we’ll ship them off to Sweden. Oh, one more thing! The winning garments will also appear in a special garment issue of Handwoven scheduled for September/October 2011. For more information go to www.svenskavav.com. (Hint: you might want to grab your Swedish dictionary first.)