A trip to New Ravenna

via Flickr

Across the Chesapeake Bay from Annapolis, MD sits the Delmarva Peninsula, so named for the three states that divide it. There's the whole of Delaware on the eastern side. It's flanked by Maryland to the west and the bottom 70 or so miles of that spit of land make up Virginia's Eastern Shore.

via Flickr

US 13 runs down the spine of the Eastern Shore and to drive south on it is to leave behind the pace and the hassles inherent in living in the rest of the northeastern US. The miles pass wide expanses of fertile fields dotted with pine and oak flatwoods. Ocassional, orderly towns come into view and there's a Spartan efficiency to them.

It's clear that for a lot of these towns, their best years are behind them. There's no real sense of loss that's readily apparent though. History runs very deep on the Eastern Shore, and that kind of history leaves a people with the steely resolve that even though the good times are in the past, they'll come back.

About two-thirds of the way down the peninsula sits the town of Exmore, VA; and in what was once an Arrow shirt factory, New Ravenna Mosaics and Stone creates some of the most beautiful work in glass and stone available anywhere.

New Ravenna Mosaics and Stone is the largest employer in Northhampton County. The 100 people who arrive at that old shirt factory every morning are artisans in every sense of the word and their workplace is an atelier much more than something that could be called a factory.

Sara Baldwin founded New Ravenna in 1991. She started as an artist with a passionate vision to bring beauty to the world through the medium of stone tesserae. That vision still burns as brightly as ever and her enthusiasm, her love, for the medium infuses everything about New Ravenna.

While it's true that New Ravenna utilizes an impressive assortment of water jets, tumblers and wet saws; at the end of the day they create their art the way mosaicists always have. Someone considers a piece of stone, cuts it into the shape she needs and then sets it in place. Repeat 10,000 times.

19 years ago, New Ravenna started out as a woman with a vision. 19 years later, New Ravenna is 100 people with a shared vision.

Look through their entire collection on their website and follow New Ravenna's latest developments through Sara Balwin's blog. Oh, and if you ever find yourself in Exmore, VA; stop in for a visit. If you can't make it to Exmore, you can find a bit of New Ravenna's Exmore at distributors far and wide.

Claudio Silvestrin presents i Frammenti

That's a sheeted mosaic tile believe it or not.

I registered to attend this year's Coverings recently, that's the tile and stone industry's big trade show. I sat it out last year and in anticipation of this year's show I've been digging through my library and revisiting all the cool stuff I saw the last time. That's where the Petracer's and the Dune posts came from last week.

As amazed as I was by those two offerings, what will always stand out to me from that show was the Brix booth. Brix is another tile company based out of Modena but to call them a tile company doesn't begin to do them justice. Brix is a design company that expresses itself through tile is a better way to describe them.

One of Brix's coolest products is a tile series developed for them by the architect/ designer Claudio Silvestrin and the series is called i Frammenti. Frammenti means fragments in Italian and the name fits.

The series gets its name from the 5mm pieces of porcelain it's made from. Each piece is a nearly perfect half centimeter by half centimeter by half centimeter cube and they are bound together on a flexible, silicone mesh. The combination of the small sizes of the individual pieces and the silicone backer make for a mosaic tile that's inherently, amazingly flexible. Because it's porcelain, it can be used indoors or out, and in wet and dry areas. The Brix booth at Coverings in 2008 featured a series of columns and other rounded shapes that were covered in i Frammenti mosaics and I'd never seen anything like it.

This product and the rest of the products made by Brix are available worldwide through better showrooms. I go to trade shows like Coverings as often as I do in order to keep on top of what new. The Italian manufacturers never fail to disappoint. And that's just the Italian manufacturers who come to the US to show off their wares. One of these days I will make to to Cersaie, in Bologna. Just as an FYI, Cersaie is the international version of Coverings though from what I understand it's in another league all together.

In the meantime, you can find more information on i Frammenti and the rest of Brix's offerings here, here and here.

Decorno strikes again

This blog will pass the two year mark in a couple of weeks and I've been thinking a lot about how I got to where I am now over the course of those two years. There are a number of blogs and bloggers who helped and inspired me along the way and very high on that list is a blog and a woman who goes by one name, Decorno.

Until I came across her blog, I had the idea that I needed to remain objective and un-opinionated in order to be an effective blogger. Reading her columns for a couple of days cured me of that, let me tell you. If you've never read Decorno, I encourage you to do so immediately.

Decorno is a community of clever commenters as much as it's a well-written and thought-out design blog. Sometimes, particularly noteworthy comments turn into posts in their own right and that's what happened over there recently.

Last Saturday, Decorno wrote a post about costly design mistakes. Her post consisted of a list of things she'd have done differently if she were given the chance to do them again. She ended the post by encouraging her readers to tell their own stories of design regret. Tell stories they did.

One of them, left by a reader named John, prompted another post all together. To wit:

Her comments section that follows that post is a riot of creative color naming and casual obscenity. Do yourself a favor and read through it. Since there's a pony at stake, leave a color story of your own. Look for a heart warming story by me and really good one from Sara Baldwin. The hands-down winner has to be a woman who goes by the name Goddess of Purple. If there's an award for best comment left on a blog, the Goddess of Purple deserves it. So again, cruise on over to Decorno's color post and wade into the comment pool.

Spoonflower's for the birds, thankfully

Kim Fraser and the gang at Spoonflower have managed to combine two of my favorite topics in a Fabric of the Week contest on their site this week. Those two topics are mass customization and birds in case you were wondering.

Spoonflower prints small-lot custom fabrics and I wrote about them quite a bit last summer. 2010 will mark their second year in business and I'm sure that anybody up there will tell you that the last two years have been one heckuva ride. Business has exploded for them and how could it not? Spoonflower allows anybody with a computer to design and have manufactured fabrics for use in home accessories or sewing with no minimums. It's incredible really and in the time that they've been doing their thing, they've built up a vibrant community around their company and the fabrics they produce.

One of the ways they build community is through a weekly Fabric of the Week contest. Every week, they pick a subject and hold a design contest based on that subject. They announce these contests through Spoonflower's blog and you can find it here. Voting ended yesterday for their Mythical Creatures contest and voting starts today on the subject of birds.

Spoonflower's contests highlight some amazing fabrics and some real talent. Most of the designers who enter every week are not professionals, rather they are regular folks with a passion for fabric design. What's cooler still is that you can buy any of the fabrics that catch your eye.

Paying attention to Spoonflower's Fabric of the Week contests is a great way to spend some time around some seriously creative people and it's a good way to keep an eye out for fabrics to turn into throw pillows, window treatments or anything else you can think of. Check it out!

In the meantime, here are some of the fabrics from the Birds contest that have caught my eye so far. What do you think?

Caroline Blue by Giltgoods

This one's for Melody McFarland:

A Parade of Pigeons --Yellow by Charclam

Western Meadowlark by Nightgarden

Bird on a Wire by Nalo Hopkinson

Brick Bird by Nalo Hopkinson

Caroline Fern by Giltgoods

Birds by Lydia Meiying

Cardinal by Aimee Elizabeth

birdlovesky by Kim Lennox

And remember, they are just some designs that caught my eye. Believe me, there are plenty more. Hats off to everyone who enters Spoonflower's contests while I'm at it. Anybody who engages in this kind of self-expression's OK in my book and to do so in public elevates them to nearly heroic status. Bravi! And on behalf of creatives everywhere I'd like to thank Spoonflower for opening up such a great space and allowing people to do their thing.

Ellen Blakeley's shattered glass mosaics

Yesterday, I wrote about Ellen Blakeley's amazing mosaic composition Meredith that won Mosaic Art Now's Best in Show juried competition for 2010. For Meredith, Ellen took shattered glass and applied it as a mosaic to a section of live oak bark.

With Ellen's skillful hand and practiced eye, that piece of bark appears to be iced over with a subtly-colored frost straight out of Lewis Carroll. That piece is at once Alice's looking glass and at the same time it's the glorification of what it is to be a tree.

Ellen Blakeley started working with shattered glass mosaics in the '90s. She was walking down a street near her home in San Francisco when she came upon a vandalized bus shelter. Somebody had shot out the safety glass window of a bus shelter with a BB gun and the shards lay sparkling on the sidewalk. She picked up a handful of the glass pieces and with a little consideration she found a new direction for her art. From a vandal's careless destruction on a San Francisco sidewalk, a body of beautiful work was born.

Ellen Blakeley makes show-stopping fine art mosaics, that much is true. Her work's also available in custom colors, shapes and sheets for use in homes and commercial spaces. You can buy her work through a network of tile showrooms nationwide and they are listed on her website here.

What follows is a series of images from Blakeley's current collection. Imagine how some of these patterns would look as a back splash, a wall or a fireplace surround. My mind reels from this stuff.

What an amazing and original idea these patterns represent. Any part of this collection would add depth and a story to a lot of the projects I work on. You know, sometimes you just need a little of that Looking Glass mystique. You can see more of Ellen Blakeley's collections on her website. Go take a look and let me know what you think.