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Confessions of a clothaholic...

My addiction began in Canada with an old LeClerc table loom that I came across in a second hand shop. I bought it and taught myself to weave with the aid of a few books. Over the years I learned about yarns: silk, wool, cotton, hemp, boucle, worsted, etc. etc.. I discovered vegetable dyes and spent months boiling onion skins, spices and even plants from the garden to get magic and subtle colours. I put the colours on the loom and wove them together to make rugs and throws and scarves.

I began to collect cloth, embroidered linen damask, crochet lace, tapestry fragments, handwoven coverlets, old American hooked rugs - everything that had been formed by a maker's hands. And I was still only beginning because cloth isn't just about weave, it's about surface design too. I discovered the joys of William Morris and the early Liberty chintzes, Voysey and the Omega Workshop and then the post war designers - Lucienne Day, John Piper, Barbara Brown etc. etc. etc.

Then I saw something that literally changed my life. It was some small bolts of indigo blue and white fabric at an antique fair lying on a table amidst a lot of crockery and tools. I fell upon them but the man who sold them to me didn't know what they were and neither did I. I only knew that they were beautiful. I began to research and discovered that they were Japanese and that they were for making kimono. A few months later I managed to acquire some kimono silks. I had never handled such exquisite fabric in my life. I couldn't get enough of these scrumptious fabrics or the kimono that they were made into, and that's how clothaholics.com was born.

I am a happy woman handling these beautiful fabrics and meeting other clothaholics like me. I'm striving to keep the fabrics affordable so that more and more people will come to enjoy them and I can only do that because they come to me through auctions. When I found out the price in Japan of these fabrics - new - I was shocked. They're very expensive and rightly so for their quality, but how wonderful that we can enjoy them in the West for a fraction of the price!

I don't know why it is that cloth draws me the way it does. Perhaps it's because cloth touches our skin as well as our sensibilities, so that we have a more intimate relationship with it than say, a piece of pottery or a fine painting. Whatever it is, I know that there are other clothaholics out there because I meet them and talk to them almost every day. With a little prompting, they all have stories to tell about their compulsion for cloth. It's a wonderful community and a fascinating journey.

Helen Smith