Lecture: On the Seamy Side with Ellen Hauptli

www.ellenhauptli.com

Ellen’s talk and slide presentation will chronicle her personal clothes-making journey from college to the present.  While attending the University of California at Davis she discovered the Design Department.  She studied clothing and its components for her undergraduate degree in Design and knew she had found her calling!  She received her MFA from the Fiberworks Center for the Textile Arts in Berkeley, CA, where she concentrated on pleated clothing.

 

Through the study of costume and textile expressions from cultures throughout the world, and in particular the restoration of a Chinese pleated and embroidered silk skirt, Ellen began making sculptural pleated clothes.  She found beauty in the simplicity and symmetry of the shapes and how, when they were worn, the body gave life to them, transforming both the garment and the wearer.  She closed her line of pleated clothes after 25+ years and now produces clothes for everyday wear.  The elements and techniques that first attracted Ellen’s interest are still important themes in her work today.  They include geometric relationships, fabric manipulation and layering, and accentuated decorative seams.  She often uses contrasting colors on her serger machines so the thread-bound joins and edges stand out even more.  Each garment has its own color-coded roadmap.

Roosevelt Room – Q-80

Free for members; $5 guests at door

 

Workshop:  Kantha Scraps to Whole Cloth

 

Kantha is a word for quilts from India and Bangladesh made from layers of fabric, stitched together usually with rows of simple running stitches.  The quilt itself is upcycled – a product of rescuing and using tired, worn out fabrics.  The best looking pieces are used for the top and bottom, whole or pieced, and old saris and rags are layered in the middle.  There can be as few as one middle layer and as many as fifteen (in her experience).  Some designers like Ellen use the kanthas (or rallis as they are called in Pakistan) for clothing.  That means there is ‘cabbage’ left behind – the scraps of fabric left over after a garment is cut from whole cloth.  What to do with these little jewels that have hundreds of beautiful hand stitches holding them together?  One solution is to build a new fabric by stitching them together so that something new can be fashioned.  This class will provide you with some kantha scraps to build your own cloth for either a bucket bag or a vest or an artwork for the wall.  You will construct the fabric without making bulky, overlapping seams.

 

Multipurpose Room – M-50

1:30 to 5:00 PM   3 1/2 hour workshop

Class size: 24 students

$45 members, $60 guests  

Supply list_Jan_final

 

Autosave-File vom d-lab2/3 der AgfaPhoto GmbH

Autosave-File vom d-lab2/3 der AgfaPhoto GmbH

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