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Anne Blinks' life spanned most of the 20th century, 1903-1995. Her
textile life spanned the second half, learning to weave while living in
Stockholm in 1949. She wove beautiful utilitarian textiles for a few
years and when she lived in Washington, D.C., 1953-54, she made herself
useful at the Textile Museum. Here she wove most of the cotton samples
for Irene Emery's book The Primary Structures of Fabrics . Her
textile interests expanded to researching historic and prehistoric
textiles. She traveled widely, and people traveled to her. She
replicated or copied cloth that was unknown to our weaving community,
bringing the textile world to us, so to speak. She passed on her
particular focus of replicating the whole cloth: the correct fiber, the
dye, the loom, the structure, the technique, the finish. She straddled
the artistic and the scholarly worlds, influencing both fiber artists and
researchers--by some, Anne was called "the missing link".
Anne left many, many textiles which she had created or collected over the years. Of these, there was a large group of samples, replicas and some finished pieces. This heritage collection became the basis for a project of the Santa Cruz Handweavers Guild, making it available to other weavers. Anne loved to put a textile in your hands, asking "What do you think, Ducky?" We hope our efforts to bring interesting cloth to people Anne had yet to meet will continue to foster the special focus she had for looking at textiles. |
Contact: Nora Rogers. Updated September, 2005