There were so many wonderful photos from the Festival.  We will be rolling out the images and stories a little at a time over the coming year.  This month's Festival offering - The Fashion Show.  Photographer Dorian Burr attended and photographed the festival, in addition to being a speaker.  We have devoted the bulk of this issue to the Fashion Show named Serendipity by its Creator and Mistress of Ceremonies, Audrey Durnan.

We are also devoting the future issues to subjects taken mostly from literary titles.  This month, A Room of One’s Own, is based on an essay by novelist Virginia Woolf.  We take from her writings that an artist needs a room - a quiet space, a private place - in which to work, to dream, to create.  And a little bit of cash.  What do you think an artist needs in order to create?

Enjoy the offerings of our member artists!

In This Issue

Brazilian Desire, Sherrill Schoening

SPIN FASHION SHOW - FESTIVAL 2016

A Serendipitous Cascade of Colors, Textures And Designs
by Denise Stewart-Sanabria

The audience attending the 2016 SPIN Fashion Show at the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, TN created a sartorial triumph by themselves. Attendees wore all kinds of silk scarves and tunics that very well may have come from the hands of some of the twenty-six silk painters whose garments were paraded through Arrowmont’s large auditorium.

The chairs that usually fall back in rows from the stage had been arranged in classic sideways parallel lines to create a runway for the models, who breezed elegantly through, though at times at a slightly delayed procession.  The delays were the perfect opportunity for ad-libs from the moderator, Audrey Durnam.  At one point we learned from her where the chic pounding background music came from. “I assigned my son the problem of finding runway music,” she said, “and he found that the music that Victoria’s Secret uses for their shows wasn’t copyrighted!”

Scheduled in the middle of the week during the SPIN conference’s silk painting workshops, at least one of the garments on the runway had just been completed while others were so complex that they had taken months of experimentation to complete.

First on the runway were three pieces by Margaret Agner (p. 10).  She worked with the most diverse materials in the show, ranging from a heavy raw micro-plaid silk in Ombre Shadow Jacket. She continued her use of more challenging materials in Night Creatures, a flowing top with a detachable scarf. The bottom of the top had a band of pre-elasticized bubble silk attached, to make it form fitting over the hips. The elastic was partly the thread itself, making different dye absorption into larger areas of man-made material less of a worry, so that it blended perfectly with the chiffon used in the rest of the garment.  Agner is known for her butterflies, and Wrapped in Wings was a stellar example.  She uses curved seams over and over in her work, and she discusses her secret in making them appear as selvedge edges in one of the artist interviews later in this article.

(To read more, go to Vol. 24, Issue No. 1.)

Pamela Glose in her studio

A Room of One's Own - Where Artists Create
by Tunizia Abdur-Raheem

The writer, Virginia Woolf, lived from 1882 to 1941.   In 1929, she was asked to speak about women and fiction before undergraduate students at two colleges in London.  These colleges, at the time, were the only colleges for women in England.  Her talks later became the essay, “A Room of One’s Own.”  The upshot of her essay was this, “…a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

One of the more striking comments Wolff made in her essay was her response upon learning that she had inherited five hundred pounds a year for the rest of her life.  The money was bequeathed to her by a deceased Aunt.  While Wolff was not born into poverty, she, like many women of her time and status was neither trained nor anticipated to earn a living on her own.

About her newfound financial status, she wrote, “The news of my legacy reached me one night about the same time that the act was passed that gave votes to women.  A solicitor’s letter fell into the post-box and when I opened it I found that she [her aunt] had left me five hundred pounds a year for ever.  Of the two—the vote and the money—the money, I own, seemed infinitely the more important.”

(To read more, go to Vol. 24, Issue No. 1.)