Promoting an understanding of human identity through textiles

While browsing the Textile Museum of Canada's website I discovered two additional sites related to the museum that I found interesting. The first is the Textile Museum of Canada's Online Collection. What's nice about this database is that it has thousands of items and each includes a detailed description of the object as well as a very high resolution photograph. When you zoom in on the image the detail you get with some of the objects is amazing. Try keywords like bead or basket, to get an idea. They also have a nice Advanced Search interface. One difficulty that I had with this databases is that there is no obvious way to return to the main information page. The best way is to navigate is with carefully chosen keywords. Try a country name, such as Peru or China, or a keyword related to textiles like indigo, quilt or tapestry.

The second site, located on the same server, is called Canadian Tapestry: The Fabric of Cultural Diversity. This site has entries grouped into five categories: places, origins, stories, bridges, workings, and functions as a front end to the Textile Museum's online collection since it links to similar objects in the bigger collection. It has extensive information about each object, and seems geared to senior elementary or middle school students in its language and organization. At the bottom of each entry page are some activities related to making textiles that also seem to be geared to this age group. I enjoyed playing "Make a mola" for a little while.