With over 200 color photographs, this book showcases the beautiful array of patterns, colors, and motifs used in the barkcloth of the past. It is a valuable resource for designs, collectors, dealers, and anyone interested in collecting, restoring, and, most of all, enjoying these wonderful fabrics.

Barkcloth was the textile of choice for window treatments, upholstery, and other household textiles of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. This book explores barkcloth's enduring appeal in almost 300 full-color images, demonstrating its scintillating combination of pattern, texture, and color. Lovers of vintage textiles and retro-design will relish this exploration. These vintage beauties are organized by florals, tropicals, leaves, abstracts, novelty, and conversational prints. Information about dating and identifying fabrics and manufacturers, along with tips on buying, restoring, and using these ever-popular fabrics, are invaluable for any collector or dealer.

Luxurious linens, lovely old lace, charming chenille and cross-stitch, and timeless textiles: collectors who love beautiful antique fabrics and seamstresses who have classic clothing they'd like to repurpose will find inspiration in these 30 superb designs. There's something for everyone, including an exquisite christening gown adorned with lace, a denim jacket with a vintage fur collar, and a jaunty set of 1950's patterned caf� curtains. A blouse made from an elegant sheer curtain panel even has three variations; one is elegant and sophisticated, another features a cute strawberry print, and a third style showcases latticework from an old nightdress. Layout sketches for every article show clearly how each vintage textile, whether a doily or mid-century tablecloth, has undergone its transformation.

Some 40 years ago, Pacific anthropology was dominated by debates about ‘women’s wealth’. These exchanges were generated by Annette Weiner’s (1976) critical reappraisal of Bronis?aw Malinowski’s classic work on the Trobriand Islands, and her observations that women’s production of ‘wealth’ (banana leaf bundles and skirts) for elaborate transactions in mortuary rituals occupied a central role in Trobriand matrilineal cosmology and social organisation. This volume brings the debates about women’s wealth back to the fore by critically revisiting and engaging with ideas about gender and materiality, value, relationality and the social life and agency of things. The chapters, interspersed by three poems, evoke the sinuous materiality of the different objects made by women across the Pacific, and the intimate relationship between these objects of value and sensuous, gendered bodies. In the Epilogue, Professor Margaret Jolly observes how the volume also ‘trace[s] a more abstract sinuosity in the movement of these things through time and place, as they coil through different regimes of value … The eight chapters … trace winding paths across the contemporary Pacific, from the Trobriands in Milne Bay, to Maisin, Wanigela and Korafe in Oro Province, Papua New Guinea, through the islands of Tonga to diasporic Tongan and Cook Islander communities in New Zealand’. This comparative perspective elucidates how women’s wealth is defined, valued and contested in current exchanges, bride-price debates, church settings, development projects and the challenges of living in diaspora. Importantly, this reveals how women themselves preserve the different values and meanings in gift-giving and exchanges, despite processes of commodification that have resulted in the decline or replacement of ‘women’s wealth’.

Now reissued with a striking new cover, Fabulous Fabrics of the 50s is the classic guide to the textiles of the exuberant post-war era, a time when bold new patterns and unprecedented color combinations revitalized dcor. Designs based on science and fantasy proliferated; no home was complete without boomerang-patterned drapes slung across the picture window or a cowboy-print couch in the living room. In this nostalgia-packed celebration of textile design, more than 170 full-color photographs accompany lively text and detailed captions highlighting the playful patterns of the 50s. Their genesis is revealed in equally fabulous fabrics from earlier eras, such as jaunty nautical designs from the 40s, over-blown florals of the 30s, and the deco-inspired prints of the 20s. A must-have resource book for collectors, designers, decorators, artists, style mavens, and pop-culture buffs, Fabulous Fabrics of the 50s is a chic and colorful tribute to a fascinating era in textile design.

A magnificent work of original research that unravels history through textiles and cloth—how we make it, use it, and what it means to us. How is a handmade fabric helping save an ancient forest? Why is a famous fabric pattern from India best known by the name of a Scottish town? How is a Chinese dragon robe a diagram of the whole universe? What is the difference between how the Greek Fates and the Viking Norns used threads to tell our destiny? In Fabric, bestselling author Victoria Finlay spins us round the globe, weaving stories of our relationship with cloth and asking how and why people through the ages have made it, worn it, invented it, and made symbols out of it. And sometimes why they have fought for it. She beats the inner bark of trees into cloth in Papua New Guinea, fails to handspin cotton in Guatemala, visits tweed weavers at their homes in Harris, and has lessons in patchwork-making in Gee's Bend, Alabama - where in the 1930s, deprived of almost everything they owned, a community of women turned quilting into an art form. She began her research just after the deaths of both her parents —and entwined in the threads she found her personal story too. Fabric is not just a material history of our world, but Finlay's own journey through grief and recovery.