Ikat and Istanbul

Tomorrow I leave for Washington, DC and the Ikat Symposium at the Textile Museum.  Before I go, I want to share my own little collection of ikat textiles with you...but be warned, you may fall desperately in love.  I brought these six cloths back from my summer trip to Istanbul, Turkey.  I was there for an international student exhibition with Marmara University, and in my down time I explored the local markets, where rugs, printed cloth, handwoven cloth, and antique textiles were piled floor to ceiling in tiny stalls, tucked into nooks and crannies and spilling out into the streets.  It was heaven.  The shop I patronized is called Cocoon: it is a highly reputable seller and a wondrous place to pass a few hours.  Though the footprint of the store was probably less than 200 square feet, it felt massive: a tiny staircase wound up and up through five (or was it six?  I lost count...) floors of textiles, ending on an open rooftop balcony with an unobstructed 360 degree view of Istanbul and the Sea of Marmara.  The image above is taken from Cocoon's little observation tower, with a view of Sultan Ahmet leading down to the water.  If you ever go to Istanbul, visit this shop.

Inside the shop:

The ground floor (r) and an upper floor (l), where I spent some serious time picking out my own ikat yardage.

And now, my ikats!

For more detail, click on the image and you will get a big old eye-full of ikat.  I brought home about two yards of each of these cloths...the pattern is more extensive than is shown here.   

This white line marks the end of a repeat pattern...see how the design is mirrored on either side?  When dyeing the pattern, the warp is folded over and over on itself...usually after two yards for these babies...this saves some time, because many repeat patterns can be tied into a single bundle.  (OK, this probably makes no sense.  Hopefully I will be able to explain a bit more clearly after my big weekend at the symposium.)

Sigh.  I am such a sucker for simple, clean, beautiful design.  This particular cloth spoke to my love of the Japanese aesthetic.

This amount of detail is plain crazy.  I hope to learn how highly complex patterns like this one are created. 

 Little fool hearts ikat, and ikat hearts little fool!

Tulips...very big in Turkey.






So I am bringing these six textiles with me to the museum this weekend.  There is an ikat show-and-tell on Sunday, and I'm hoping to learn a little more about the significance of and process behind these six designs.  And needless to say, I am dying to introduce a bit of ikat into my own Lf designs.  It might just be research for a while, but I am head-over-heels in love...I must have ikat around my neck!  (Hopefully I'm not the only one!)