Hi Luann,
Perhaps you know the work of one of my friends, Dorothy Caldwell, who's one of the most important artists working in Canada now. Here's a link to a large exhibition of her textile works organized by the Textile Museum of Canada:
http://www.textilemuseum.ca/exhibitions_caldwell.html
The pictures don't capture the really exciting, complex working of the fabrics in her huge tapestries, but if you google her you'll find a number of galleries with better close-ups of her smaller work.
Caldwell says: "One of the great things about cloth as a material is that it disintegrates easily – it's so fragile that it is continuously being made and remade into something new. Fragments containing a previous history are reconstructed into a new object ... at least historically that's how it was. We don't do that as much today. Cloth does not have the same value that it once did. For me, the repair and reconstructing process builds a sense of history, and it all becomes a part of the cloth."
Personally, I think that in most cultures women have been in the forefront of the remaking and reinventing of domestic materials women's work - and it's because that kind on activity is disappearing in our own culture that I'm curating the exhibition that I've talked about.
In our own time, it's the work of artists - like Caldwell, like your own work and like that fabulous bead that Luigi showed us in a previous post, where he took a discarded fragment of the past, reworked it and incorporated it into something new.
In all of this, I think motivation matters. The motivation of the person who repairs a valued bead or bracelet, the motivation of the artist who tries to draw attention to her or his links to tradition - these are different from that of the person who takes a perfectly good bead, breaks it, and then repairs it again, so that it can be sold to the gullible at a higher price. For me aesthetic judgements cannot be separated from questions of function and motivation - though I'm on dangerous ground I know!
Will