We were both at the Royal College of Art in our final year (I did Fashion, Cressida Textiles) during the great miners’ strike in 1985. And lo and behold, she found an old screen in the back of her studio which must go back to those days! Although it was not her own screen, clearly, her father not having been a miner… but I digress.
The fact is that it is possible to print with mud, and that is fantastic news! I will bring out screens and we will probably be able to expose them in sunlight only! It means we can make much finer lines, and therefore we could for instance make bogolan scarves with Arabic writing on them, taken straight from the manuscripts – it would be great for a future little shop at the manuscript library for instance…Talking about the manuscripts, the team is still working every night in Djenne, and I have been to see the team here at the British Library who are pleased with the progress.
But I digress yet again…
The most important thing at the moment is to get the MaliMali furniture fabrics/clothing/accessories going on a larger scale, and to that end I am seeing my website designer this very afternoon to make a selling MaliMali website, and tomorrow I am going to see the organisers of Decorex, an interior furnishing fair where I hope to have a stand for MaliMali at the end of September. The stand will have mud walls- it will be terribly chic!
The lovely Richard Trillo, writer of the rough Guide to West Africa amongst other oeuvres, has kindly taken it upon himself to try and nudge me gently into the 21st century by being my guide in the labyrinthine world of new technology /internet phenomena such as Twitter. Ladies and Gentlemen, I am now a Twitterer, courtesy of the said Richard. In his opinion, this is the way forward to try and market MaliMali to the modern world. But I am but a fledgling yet, so don’t hope for much if you manage to find me on Twitter- I am called MaliMaliSophie, you can apparently also find me under my name Sophie Sarin….