3 Ways to Harness the Power of the V&A Digital Collections: Infinite Inspiration? Quite Possibly!

Now you can dive into the deep pool of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s online collections and own this superpower whenever you want a spark of inspiration.

If you’ve ever visited the museum in person, you already know the pleasure of browsing around the “family of art, design and performance museums, where everyone is invited to enjoy the power of creativity.” If you haven’t yet had the pleasure, you won’t regret the time invested in beginning to explore the V&A Digital Collections–inspiration at your fingertips.

This post will arm you with the basics of how to bring this intense treasure chest of art, craft and culture to your desktop or phone.

It all starts with the home page at vam.ac.uk. At the time of this writing, the Diva exhibition is making the home page navigation a bit hard to read, but you can find the Collections button in the top navigation bar, or in the three-bar menu on mobile.

The Collections button will take you to the main Collections page. Scroll down to see currently featured categories.

There are 2 main ways to proceed from here: via the search function or using filters.

1 – Using the Search function

Let’s start by going back up into the search bar and entering a topic of interest. As a fabric geek, I’ll look for textiles.

That’s a pretty broad search term. I can see by the text below the search box that I’ve chosen to look for a category defined in the system. To further focus your search, you could add additional keywords to your search term.

But as an example, let’s follow this path to the endpoint. The next option will be whether you want all the results, see only objects currently on display, or narrow choices to only show the objects that have images. That’s the one I normally choose.

Now I can visually scroll through the objects in the collection.

The brief label information displays the fabric’s date and manufacturer. Clicking on the image brings up the swatch with full details about this swatch visible by scrolling down the page.

To look at the object more closely, scroll back up to the top of the object page to use the + or – controls to zoom in or out. On mobile, you’ll need to click the object in order to zoom in and out or download.

Here’s the enlarged detail:

At any level of detail, you can choose to download an image.

You’ll be able to see the exact terms of use for images in the collection and give your agreement. If the image requires licensing, the button will say “License image” instead of download, and the resulting popup will include instructions on how to proceed.

Now that you’ve seen the basics of using the Search tool, it’s time for the other powerful way to access objects in the collection: using the filter options in the left navigation rail.

2 – Browsing with filters.

Scroll back up to the top of the page and click the Collections tab. Click the Search button with nothing in the Search window.

…which will result in offering you all the objects in the collections, with a list of the filters you can use in the left navigation bar. On mobile, click “Show filters” in the top right to bring up this list.

Over a million objects in the collection! The + (plus sign) to the right of each filter will pull up a list of options.

The style filter has 47 options, for example. And you can choose multiple filters to refine what you’d like to see.

This result has 3 filters applied to show only Qing dynasty saucers from Ceramics Room 139, The Curtain Foundation Gallery:

You can see how powerful the filters can be.

The third way to access the digital collections is to combine methods 1 and 2.

3 – Combining search and filters

It’s straightforward–just start with a search term and then choose the filters you want to apply to the result.

Here, I started with a search for “stuffed” and then applied filters for glove puppets from Great Britain:

So that’s all there is to it. Easy, right? Three powerful ways to get into the digital collections and find treasures to spark your creativity–I hope you’ll try them. If you’re interested in learning more about the kind of thinking and planning that goes on behind the scenes in continuing efforts to make the vast collection accessible, here’s a great read.

Please let me know if you have any special objects to share, or other museums whose digital collections you appreciate. Happy hunting!

The Rediscovery of Things Past: a Sweet Pleasure of Old Age

A small story of how our yesterdays can refuel our todays…

We’d lived for over 25 years in our house in San Francisco when our big move swept us away to the north. I hadn’t realized that I’d taken for granted how cozily we had nested there. How many small systems and processes we’d built up over the years in that house, which itself was a well-designed mid-century machine for family living.

It’s been close to five years since we moved almost a thousand miles north to our country house snuggled up against the Washington/BC border. But still there are unpacked boxes, and organizing remains a work-in-progress. The pandemic seriously disrupted our settling process since our city life is on the Canada side of the border, our country life is in the US, and Covid severely limited border crossings, and therefore, us. So I’m just now starting to feel like my studio may be settling into an efficient order.

The big move forced us out of our cozy beloved ruts (lemon!) and offered fresh perspectives on our lives (lemonade!). Recently I’ve been reaping some of the rewards of the changes, swept up in a whirlwind of rediscovery of treasures from my past. This time of life often brings long-slumbering desires to the surface. For me, one of those unsatisfied desires centers around textile design, surface design for printed fabrics. It’s an interest I had long relegated to the back burner, but it’s been insistently calling to me.

The emergence of print-on-demand options like Spoonflower has brought new potentials to pattern designers, almost like desktop publishing for fabric. I can order a swatch, or a fat quarter, 18 by 22 inches, or a run of yardage, choosing fabric from the thinnest voile to a very chunky canvas–each printed in my own design.

Back in my days at Fiberworks in Berkeley I’d learned the foundations of textile designs, but at that time only professionals had the luxury of seeing their work produced. Fueled by these new, previously unimaginable choices, the textile design craving has been growing rather fierce.

But what do I actually want to print? Aside from a well-formed opinion about what makes textile designs great, I hardly had any idea of what I wanted to carry forward.

And so that whirlwind of rediscovery came to my rescue, to settle the question. As I was reviewing memorabilia, I idly leafed through a notebook I’d kept in 2007 in London, during a month of exploration.

I was quite startled to come across a series of rough sketches I’d made at the Victoria and Albert Museum and around the streets of the city. My notebook felt like an an invitation to enjoy a fresh look at my experiences from more than 15 years ago.

The V&A Textile Study Room was like Aladdin’s cave to me at that time, brimming with fabric treasures. Have you ever had a time in your life when you couldn’t believe how lucky you were? That’s how it was for me as I basked in the pleasure of being so present with the immediacy of those materials.

For a textile-lover, there’s an intense satisfaction in being able to look at an actual piece of fabric like this one below, block printed resist and mordant dyed cotton from Gujarat in Western India, possibly 700 years old. Exploring the repeat pattern, and thinking about the skilled hands that crafted it, so far across time, with such a lively dynamic esthetic that is still energetic and fresh today. Not in a photograph, it’s as intimate and different a view as looking at a Van Gogh painting rather than a picture in a book or a print.

Somehow I had forgotten how many sketches I’d made in that small sketchbook cache. Opening it up now and leafing through it is like drinking in a deep pool of nourishment from my past, almost forgotten, but still accessible. Sketches from the Textile Study Room, silhouettes of unfamiliar birds, and even the candied eggplant dessert we shared at the Turkish restaurant are fertile territory for Spoonflower explorations after years of slumber in that little book.

After that visit I had dreamed of spending a month in London and sketching in the Textile Study Room every single day. But…the next time I was back at the V&A, the room was closed for remodeling. Then the textile frames were reborn as a photographs gallery. More recently, most of the collection was transferred to digital access.

I do not question the care and conservation that have taken the materials at one remove from the casual museum visitor. They’re more safely preserved now, as well as visible to viewers around the world. But I’ll always be endlessly grateful that I spent as many hours as I could in the Textile Study Room while it was possible to see so many pieces up so close.

I’ve scanned in my old sketches and begun to play more actively to try out some fabric designs. At the same time, I’m carrying forward new respect for the inspiration that’s hidden away in my own personal journeys, waiting for rediscovery.

I hope you’re rediscovering treasures from your past, as well. So much of life is about change, and the assumption that things will always be there to visit again is often doomed to disappointment. While there’s something to be said for living cautiously and postponing pleasures, there are resonating pleasures that come from eating dessert first!

If you’d like to explore the treasure hoard of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s stellar online collection yourself, I’ve written a how-to here to make it easy to access.

Please share any stories like this from your life. Do you have a long-buried wish that’s been rejuvenated by the revisiting your history? I’d love to hear that story!

Inspiration – The Vac Shop, Seattle

We were a little bit lost in Seattle when we stumbled across the Vac Shop, but the minute I laid eyes on it, I knew it was a worthy destination. The front yard and fence of this otherwise ordinary shop were adorned with multiple creatures and objects fashioned from vacuum cleaners and their parts. That’s the Space Needle, directly left of the front door, and here’s the rest of what I captured that day:

The red reindeer on the rooftop

2 vacuum beings

Red and black long-tailed pincer creature

2 robots (?) – not really sure about that one on the right -maybe a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle?

Dragon!

Vacuum train

Closeup of Electrolux car on the train

Furry eyebrowed noseface

I don’t know about you, but I can’t help but be inspired by this outpouring of creativity. It certainly changed a gray Seattle day into a day I’ll never forget!

The Vac Shop
402 S Lucile St.
Seattle, WA 98108