Ragged Cloth Cafe, serving Art and Textiles

You may notice that things look a bit different on Ragged Cloth Cafe today. We are in the middle of various adjustments.

15 months ago, a group of dedicated textile artists set out to put together a blog that would look at art — in all its forms — from our own cloth-draped eyes, with our own particular and sometimes persnickety textile perspectives. In the last year, we have posted 125 different entries on artists, art ideas, art queries, art history, art phenomena, and textile art. We have had 157,990 total views, which makes about 1,263 views, on average, per individual post. Not bad for our tiny niche in a (mixed metaphor alert!) small pond.

And now it’s time to make some changes. The challenge of once-a-month posts by each contributor (really, once a month essays, heavily researched and carefully written) has caused us to need to pull back a bit. Moreover, new tools, such as the ability to send a note to your email address directly, have become readily available. You might have seen that we now have an email subscription form as well as an rss feed on the Home page of Ragged Cloth.

This means that we can publish less frequently and less regularly, but still know that our readers will be current on our postings. We are suspending our regular Sunday/Wednesday posting but promising to return at nice intervals, to continue our conversations.

At the same time, we are adding information to the sidebar of each Home page, so you can circle back through older posts and refresh your memory of what was spoken to or just re-enjoy the images that have been deposited there.

So Shiva, the Destroyer and Regenerator, is at work here today. Within the week we hope to have settled on a pleasant and informative format. And then we’ll go about our posting work, finding and bringing to you, our dedicated readers, the thoughts of myriad and fascinating minds, brought to bear on the world that is art.

Subscribe to the email service or set your rss feed and come back as we find new materials to chew on (alas, yet another mixing of metaphors to make a great stew)

And here is an old pal, Mrs. Willard, Dicing with the Devil. Destroyer and Regenerator, Mrs. Willard hides her extra arms and has put on a bit of (camouflage) weight, but she’s still formidable — Shiva in modern dress.

[Editor’s Note: the writer of this post insists on designating herself as the responsable,  taken from the Spanish, which she says means “the facilitator of the project, a temporary post, held by a humble soul who knows that in responsibility lies change and hope but who declines to be ‘in charge’.” In other words, she disavows responsibility as  “Someone Who Knows Anything.” She also claims not to have been able to put responsable in italics in the title, which she should have done, according to well-acknowledged copy editing procedures. The Editor has decided to allow the unorthodox form to stand, while refusing to take the role of responsable in this particular instance.]