Bodkin Blog

love you, louise

Bodkin — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 03:06:40 +0000

“Art is a guarantee of sanity. That is the most important thing I have said.”

1911-2010

Cumul, 1968

In her studio, 1946. Courtesy Louise Bourgeois archive

Behind her sculpture Eye to Eye, ph. Raimon Ramis, 1990

georgia on my mind

Bodkin — Mon, 24 May 2010 23:20:21 +0000

Spring 2011, here we come…

One of some 300 portraits of the artist taken by her husband Alfred Stieglitz.

Georgia O'Keefe, 1958, by Don Worth, Oklahoma Arts Institute

Alfred Stieglitz, 1918

Do This

Bodkin — Mon, 17 May 2010 18:00:41 +0000

Green Mountain Energy

Did you know there are wind farms in upstate New York? Now, you can directly buy wind power. It doesn’t mean your particular apartment gets power sent straight from the farm (a grid is a grid), but it’s more direct than the “green” option your power company offers.

Read about it and sign up here— Green Mountain Energy is up and running in New York, Texas, and other states. If you live in NYC, it’s better sign up in person at the Fort Greene Flea on Saturdays (it keeps salespeople employed, and they make a donation to the market).

FELT, PART 1

Bodkin — Mon, 17 May 2010 17:52:07 +0000

All photos by Bruce Buck for the NY Times

Can we move in here?

The Inspiration Files: Vitra Design Museum

Bodkin — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:50:17 +0000

For reasons that are temporarily top-secret, I was around the German-Swiss-French border two weekends ago and discovered the headquarters of Vitra, the Swiss-German manufacturer of visionary furniture and object design. The manufacturing facilities are designed by the likes of Tadao Ando and Zaha Hadid. And then there’s the newest addition, which opened three days before I visited: the Design Haus, by Herzog and De Meuron. It consists of several stacked forms that look like cartoon houses. The windows are maybe 30 feet high, with sweeping views of vineyards, and a trove of modernist delights inside.

The exterior

Noguchi paper lanterns, a personal favorite.

My first encounter with a geodesic dome since Epcot, 1990.

Psychedelic textiles in every corner.

Verner Panton's Living Tower, 1969.

My favorite of Alexander Girard's whimsical painted dolls.

A history of the Eames chair.

A portrait of the Eamses beside a Utensilo. I have one in white--my prized possession.

grooviness

Built-in benches and cantilevers galore. The entire outside area smelled of fresh cedar.

fast eddie’s

Bodkin — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 23:43:27 +0000

Even if you don’t know about it, many small clothing lines are, by necessity, scavengers or recyclers. The little guys often end up buying big companies’ leftovers. Case in point: These buttons, soon to appear in the FW10 collection, are part of an unused lot once made for Eddie Bauer. We spent about two hours trying to figure out the button situation before these showed up. Decision made.

Taking care of business

Bodkin — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:07:47 +0000

Sorry for the lack of posts, but between the holiday and getting the AW10 collection ready, there’s little time to do anything besides TCOB (in Bodkin office parlance). One of the many time-consuming tasks is preparing all of the shibori-dyed T-shirts and bustiers for spring production (in stores soon!). This is no ordinary tie-dye. Each top is cut from 2 or 3 large panels of fabric. Each panel must be painstakingly measured and pleated, then hand-stitched using dental floss, which is then pulled tight enough to cause guitarist-grade calluses. We’ve all been chipping in on nights and weekends, and it’s almost time for the 80-odd pieces to take their bath in blue. Here is Willie—our new intern, and a brilliant textile artist in his own right—needling around at the studio.

These...

...become these.

whoa, nettles!

Bodkin — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:28:48 +0000

I periodically visit a multi-disciplinary holistic health practitioner (the amazing Katinka Locascio; New Yorkers, she will change your life, write in for contact info) who also grows and blends herbs. During our first session, she told me that my body was “asking for nettles,” and that taking them would help my oft-pain-addled lower back. Well, they did, and now it turns out the stinging herb (fast becoming a foodie favorite, too) can also be used to make clothes: it grows easily without pesticides, and its hollow fibers insulate beautifully.

Nettle fibers with bark...

...and cleaned up.

Wild nettles have actually been used for textiles since the dawn of recorded history, though they fell out of favor when industrial cotton production took off. (Although it’s been popular for tablecloths, and the German army in WWI used it for their uniforms during a cotton shortage.) Now that alternative textiles are taking off, it’s finding a new audience, and Bodkin’s Fall 2010 collection is going to include some Himalayan wild nettle-blend fabric! According to one supplier, 80,000 Nepalese are employed in harvesting and spinning nettle textiles. The stuff is richly textured and cool in an urban-Bedouin sort of way.

Nettle-blend fabric swatches

Time to have some of Katinka’s organic Vermont-grown nettle-gotu kola-goldenseal-echinacea “Katinkture” tea, also known as the Bodkin flu shot.

Animal of the Week: Narwhal

Bodkin — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 20:44:33 +0000

Here at Bodkin, we embrace our dorkiness. We tend to send each other pictures of funny animals all day, and today our studio-mate Jacqueline said, “why don’t you add that to your blog?” And why not? Learning about animals is, after all, a way to learn about your world, and why it’s worth protecting.

So here, without further adieu, is the narwhal. An Arctic and North Atlantic-dwelling member of the whale family, its distinctive twisted tusk is actually a tooth found on males only (it’s not for hunting or ice-cutting; it’s thought to be a secondary sex characteristic, like peacock feathers. So the bigger the tusk…you get the picture.) In centuries past, northern traders would peddle the tusks as unicorn horns to gullible merchants and royalty.

So, then…have a great weekend!

The Inspiration Files: Domus Magazine

Bodkin — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 18:16:30 +0000

Domus is an Italian architecture and design magazine. My dad collected it in the 70s and I’ve saved a few copies. That woman is so cool that I don’t even know what else to say.