rodeo bill

I've just got back from a week around Albuquerque New Mexico, which was totally made by extremely kind recommendations from @chicote. We're so grateful- thank you! Most of my photos are of family, but here are a some solo/landscape highlights, some including Working slack jeans: landscape just outside Corrales, where we were staying, on the way to a site of hundreds of Native American petroglyphs: which appear on rocks where black 'glaze' of oxidised iron is scratched away to make a lighter mark of the rock beneath: they were not easy to spot, here's a close up: we also saw a coyote clambering over the rocks, and the rest of my family saw a thorny devil (aka hornytoad, squirts blood out of its eyes), and we saw lots of anole lizards and 5-line skinks. Throwing a rock across the Rio Grande: the riverbed is almost totally dry at this time of year, where we were: best meals we had (we returned!) were at Itality in Albuquerque, on a plaza for indigenous-owned businesses, serving entirely vegetable local Native American food. It was fantastic, this photo doesn't really do the food justice but the stew was great (lentils, green chiles, summer squash), as were the 'pueblo tacos', and fry bread, which has a problematic history (devised from US-provided rations during enforced relocation), but seems to be a part of the NM culture now and tastes really good: up nearer Santa Fe the altitude is seriously high, and the clarity of light is spectacular. It's also a lot less hot, and a lot greener: Just outside the Jemez pueblo there's a calcium carbonate (chalk right?) 'frozen' waterfall: inside we found a crystal clear pool of water coming from a drip in the ceiling. Don't judge me, I tasted it, tasted like Topo Chico no lie Fenton lake, at the end of the same drive up into the mountains: the best bit for me was our visit to Sky City, the Acoma people's Pueblo- it's a long drive through pretty much desert to get there, but the landscape changes so radically with the geology that the drive itself was one of the best bits. It's at the top of a mesa (flat top mountain) and we got a bus up, and a tour by a woman whose family have a home there. Here's the view from the top: and the streets: a stairway to the skies (the top horizontal is a cloud, the verticals are rain) bread oven: the walk down is on very steep steps cut into the rock, with scooped hand holds: on our last day we went to Tinkertown, halfway up to Sandia Peak, which is the mountain that looks over Albuquerque. It's barely describable, but it's a gallery/workshop/home of Ross Ward, who was a sign painter and model maker. There are thousands of carved figures and scenes, a lot of them automata, mostly in the circus/fairground vernacular. Plus a boat that his brother built and sailed around the world, plus vast collections of pretty much anything you can imagine, all jammed into tight wooden corridors and rooms built out of concrete with thousands of glass bottles set into them, which act as windows, like this: bonus picture, I thought it was really cool that construction workers had hard hats with clip-on wide brims and sun/insect nets: Again, @chicote I'm just so grateful for all the time you took putting this itinerary for us together, I think we did all but one thing you suggested, which was too far of a drive. Best trip in ages.

This deserves more rep! Maybe not for everyone here but this is an amazing watch. My current favourite is a Junghans Max Bill, one of the original configurations, with plexiglass crystal. It's on a titanium mesh strap today but I also like it very much on black apple leather with Working SKEWed Slack Jeans

thanks @Le Clown Bleu- you can find some things at Goodies Oxford, Peggs & Son Brighton, and The Bureau Belfast. A couple of images of these went out in the newsletter I just sent out, but here are some more details. The best-worn pair of Weaver's Blanket Denim trews I've seen, very kindly brought in by a long-time customer and great friend of the brand. Note the twill switching at various points:

spotted this this morning growing under a neighbour's fence! Also Milkweed is everywhere (and a beautiful plant too)

Thanks for the suggestion @ATWM! I'd not heard of this, but Deborah had, and now I see it there's quite a bit of it around our neighbourhood. Deborah had already been thinking about getting some- she's developing our backyard into a very small native forest garden. Interesting! In the meantime, Lukas Mauve just wrote a lovely piece for his substack Present Forever (well worth a look through generally) here: https://presentforever.substack.com/p/the-tender-co-interview

seconded @chicote: @rbeckthese are spectacular- congratulations 🙂

beautiful @chicote, thank you for the photos. Here's a picture of it brand new. The fabric for this was called 'Laundry Bag Cloth' and was a 100% cotton version of fabric woven for NHS hospital laundry sacks- the warp is pale blue (if I remember correctly) with a white weft and occasional blue weft bands, which mark off where the bags would be filled to and seamed. This was made on the same loom, just the weft was switched from polyester to cotton. Here's a photo of the original garment- it's a wattle dyed 424 Wallaby Pocket Short Sleeve Shirt from SS17

Thank you for this @merzbot! I want to do a superfuture-level rundown on the Working SKEWed jeans in the next week or so, but actually I just came on to show some details of the 900 Bull Denim, so good timing. This fabric is woven with a 100% cotton warp and a 50/50 wool/hemp weft. Generally speaking, dyes react differently with cellulose fibres (eg cotton, linen) and protein fibres (eg wool, silk), and even more generally speaking dyes stick better to protein than to cellulose. This can be quite subtle, for example with woad, where the blue is relatively deep across all the fibres in the fabric (with the original undyed fabric below): the khaki, particularly, took to the wool much more readily than to the cotton or hemp, creating a sort of turquoise wool fuzz over the top of a paler green cotton/hemp ground: lastly, though, here's a version which is a little more subtle, but which I'm really excited by. This is dyed hadal blue with a formula that reacts only with wool, so that the cotton and hemp remain completely undyed. It gives the effect of a fabric woven with an undyed warp and a melange fibre dyed warp, where dyed wool is spun with undyed hemp, but all with a single garment dye. The jacket reads as denim, but with the softness and lightness of the bull denim cloth.

Thank you so much, both! Actually, I'm going to continue making jeans in the UK for the foreseeable future- it's the seasonal things that will be coming through made in the US. I have a lot of denim fabric in stock in England, and this way I can keep repeat orders of jeans going there while doing the more hands-on stuff here. It's all still shaking out, but I really appreciate the enthusiasm. Michael, best of luck with the move, and AlienToy indeed! I'm very excited to be starting up with Today- they seem to be lovely people and it's a great store. I mentioned this in the newsletter too, but how's this for a beautiful colour?! purple logwood on very fine yarn cotton Mackintosh:

I love this modification! Did you cut away the pleats from the inside, or is the fabric still there? If so it would be cool to let them out again once the main body fabric has faded out a lot, so you'd get a much darker contrast in the sides. Either way, though, lovely job- very exciting 🙂

lovely @Georg! I'll post pics of my own one of these sometime soon. For now, though, I have a new jeans type, 156, which are coming in to stockists and which I'm really pleased with. they're a significantly higher waist than previous cuts (varies a bit by fabric and size, but my indigo sizer 4 pair is 14.75" front and 18.5" back), and come with X back braces. More to the point, though, they're cut straight, as tailored trousers, rather than open, as jeans. Here's my double indigo broken twill pair, which I've been wearing since September or so: They're based around somewhere between the 132 and 136 cuts, but with a raised waist, and rather than having an angled front and back seam (like jeans), the fronts are cut almost straight on the grain line. This is a cutting angle which works best with suspenders/braces, and is traditional for dress trousers, or early workwear which was basically a heavy version of the same thing. The first Tender jeans, 132, was adapted from British Rail uniform pants, but cut open to wear like jeans. This is going back to the original, in some ways. Here's a fairly clear demonstration of open and closed cutting: Ok they're all diagonal, but you can see the change in angle across the centre seam in type 133 trews: Compared to the almost parallel stripes in 156: The side pockets are cut into the seams, and the yoke remains at the position that it would be for a standard waist pair, so that the extra shape stays in the seat and the raised waist sits above it (if they're worn high- if you wear them low like I mostly do then they fall down a bit but feel like high waisted trousers worn low, which is a really nice, subtly different, effect). The waist band is put on as two separate pieces, with a gap in the middle where the seat panels are just hemmed. This is a less costumey take on the idea of a split back or fishtail back, but done in a mechanised jeans waist way. These come from the new Spring/Summer 2025 production, which is the last fully UK-made Tender collection. More in all this soon, and as it develops, but the plan is to move clothing production and dyeing, and eventually weaving, to our new home in the US. Having said that, I have stock of denim fabric in the UK so for the foreseeable future jeans will continue to be made in the UK. More soon!

Yesterday I did a slot at my son's elementary school careers day, and talked with a group of third graders (8-9 year olds) about being a fashion designer. They were all great, and one kid was really pleased when he was pulling apart a cutting of denim that I'd passed around and saw that the inside of the yarn was white. "this must be why jeans get white when they get worn out". I swelled with pride on behalf of all of us.

Thanks Georg! I'm really pleased you enjoyed the talk 🙂 I'd add a couple of points to @julian-wolf's excellent advice- firstly I think these spots actually look kind of great, and especially as they're quite low on the garment I don't think I'd worry about them too much. But if they're an issue for you, the first thing I'd check is if you've tried a stain remover as well as a wool wash? These can be a problem with dyed garments, but as this is just undyed wool it's worth having a go with a natural stain bar (I like the clay-based type sold as 'savon de marseille terre de sommière'), or even just a regular supermarket one- Oxiclean stain stick gel does a pretty amazing job, although it's potentially harsher. If you do decide to dye your shirt, please bear in mind that the thread on these Weaver's Stock shirts is synthetic, so it may show up as a contrast white to whatever colour you dye with. This depends a bit on the dye and the method you use, and will be less noticeable on a relatively light dye colour. I hope this make sense and helps! the texture on your shirt is really special, so it should look good whatever you decide- please let us know.

As promised, here's a video of my talk. Just gone out to mailing list subscribers, but for people that aren't on that, here it is: https://mediaspace.wisc.edu/media/Understandable+Design+and+Perfect+Imperfections+with+William+Kroll+of+Tender+Co./1_8yi6cv0u/171463141 A bit in there about superfuture and how great our community is in general, and some examples of member's Tender clothes, although I could have sited many more. I checked with the only person who's visible themselves (thank you!), I hope other members won't mind their things being shown- I only used images already posted publicly.

thanks @jeash90! Yes it was a great trip. I was mostly just on the University campus, so I'm sure there's more to see in the city, but the college was fantastic and it's always a pleasure meeting students. I'm hoping to get a video back of the talk, in which case it'll go out as a newsletter asap.