material monday · shambhala
Monday 23 June 2008 | I like a cookie
Silk is deeply troubling for me, conceptually; and overwhelmingly desirable in its immanence.
I can no longer pretend I don’t know what humanity has put poor Bombyx mori through, or how many thousands of cocoons it takes to create a scant yard of the stuff that slips through fingers so gossamer-whisper-translucent lovely that it makes me feel faint. My ethical compromises have been feeble, at best: recycling exhausted thrift-store clothes, snatching up wild silk where I find it; but in general, succumbing and worshipping and giving praise for and thanks to, as Hanne Vibeke De Koning-Stapel says in the dedication to her book, the many hands and many eyes of the workers who make silk possible, and “to the significance of the innumerable insignificant little caterpillars that spin the unexcelled and most desirable of all fibers into prodigious cocoons.”
This week I fell painfully in love with a new manifestation of heaven come to light on earth. I thought I knew them all—taffeta, georgette, organza, habotai, dupioni, tussah, noil—but the fiendishly inventive Silk Baron (whose textiles have garbed, among others, the silver-clad elves from The Lord of the Rings) has come up with something called shambhala. When I emailed to ask about it, the Baron himself, Andrew Bloom, wrote back (and very promptly too). Apparently shambhala “incorporates all three of the tussah, jitta, and noil grades…to stunning effect, because each of them absorbs dye slightly differently from the others, giving this kind of fabric a subtle tri-tone appearance.” Bien sûr I now itch to handle it, drape it, sniff it and see what happens when I stab a quilting needle into it (true love being always tinged with cruelty)—oh, the Silk Baron will have all my monies! But can you imagine a quilt like this or this in these two colors? Save me, Jebus!
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