Welcome to Skoglund & Clarke's first blog post: Grain beads

Finally we have published our webbshop, it took many years to get this far, still just started and more to come! Why so much time? Well, it is not only time-consuming to manually produce textiles with traditional methods which most of our collection consists of, it is also a lot of work to fiber analyze, count threads, photograph and describe them. That said, it is one of the most fun things we know and not least deep into the literature or visit remote places to take part in peoples craft and nature behind the objects.

This first blog will be about a particularly useful plant that is often seen as an element in various textiles around the world, the cultivated seed grain Coix lacryma. Beads of all kinds are not only important, also beautiful and some are made by humans such as metal or glass beads. Others are simply picked from the nature, such as shells from the sea or dried beans from wild creepers and for sure there are many more. Both wild or cultivated beans or seeds are extremely nice, hard and shiny like shells and C. lacryma also have a perfect hole in it so it is just to sew a thread through. Several ethnic groups are used them around the world and those seed beads in the basket are from KaTu people who lives near the boarders between Vietnam and Laos. Other groups such as Akha people in China (Yunnan province) often use them as elements on net-satchels made of djungel vines (Pueraria phaseoloides) as this little bag on the picture.