Category: At The Seams
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The Water Lily
“And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.” – Matthew 6:28 In his Sermon on the Mount, while speaking to his followers upon their anxiety about clothing, Jesus evoked the image of the flower lily. Particularly notable is his skillful…
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The Lotus
In Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, Odysseus told of the Lotus-eaters, the Lotophagi race who lived on an island off the coast of Tunisia. On this island were full of lotus trees. “Whosoever of them ate of the honey-sweet fruit of the lotus, had no longer any wish to bring back word or to return,…
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Jackie’s Cotton Shift Dress
When peace and prosperity returned after the long years of World War II, Paris reigned again as the arbiter of high fashion, and the powers that be were turning their eyes toward a race into space, a young lady would emerge to become the epitome of glamor, who captivated the public eye as an American…
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Blackwork
Blackwork is the term for impressing design patterns onto the skin with black, sometimes red, color pigments, including temporary dyes such as henna and tattooing dyes such as soot. Produced with combs, needles, and cutting tools, using techniques such as hand-tapped, hand-poked, skin-cut, and skin-stitched, numerous societies practice blackwork to express cultural identities, rituals, histories,…
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Journey to the Other World
In Polynesian parable, to lift the sky meant to expand the known world. Each discovery enlarged the habitable world, raising the height of the sky. Polynesians envisioned the Sky or the Heavens as a huge cupola covering their sea and islands. The sky cupola housed all the stars and heavenly bodies. When the Europeans appeared,…
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The Fish Hook of Maui
The story of the Polynesian Demi-God Maui fishing up islands explains the creation of the Hawaiian islands. In Polynesian lores, “fishing up islands” means to discover different islands, or to fish islands out from the sea. The story of Maui wishing to catch a big fish as an analogy for uniting the Hawaiian islands goes…
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Kawa Ora
Tattoos have been practiced for millennia across the world as a form of cultural and historical record. In ancient Egypt and Nubia, women tattooed on their thighs the image of Bes, a deity associated with fertility and childbirth. For the Ainu people of Japan, the tattoo was a symbol of beauty, a talisman, and an…
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The Peacock Bride
While the white color has become mainstream for wedding dresses across the modern world, it was not the only color considered historically. In fact, in numerous cultures, white has been the color reserved for funerals. Yet today, even societies using white traditionally to pay respect to the dead have embraced this color for their wedding…
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The Rainbow Bride
In the history of civilizations, there is but one record of fusion of two separate cultures: the Indo-Greek Kingdom, covering modern-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, and northwestern India. During the two centuries of their rule, the Indo-Greek kings combined the Greek and Indian languages and symbols and blended Greek and Indian ideas. The diffusion of the Indo-Greek…
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The Black Gold Bride
“Who can find a good woman? She is precious beyond all things.” Prov. 31:10 A masterpiece of the world’s heritage, the Taj Mahal is considered the greatest achievement of Indo-Islamic architecture. Its rhythmic architectural combination of solids and voids, concave and complex, light and shadow is perfectly symmetrical and harmonious. Its elements of lush green…
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