more quilt!

I posted a few pictures of my baby a while ago but I've done so much since then! I finished piecing together the quilt top (pictured) and the bottom layer (not pictured - it's 10" squares, all different shades of muslin, like the light colored hexagons).

 This is my quilting hoop, holding all the layers in place while I do the quilting. A quilt has three layers:

1. The top - in this quilt, it's the patchwork that you see in the picture
2. The middle - this can be batting, but for this quilt, I used an old down comforter
3. The backing - I made a patchwork backing for this quilt, but they're often one large solid piece of fabric. I pieced my backing together because I had lots of scraps and no money, since I started this quilt right before graduating college

You stitch through all the layers and that's what makes it a quilt. For this one, I'm quilting around the inside of each of the lighter colored hexagons.

manifesto

This is a photo of me and one of my BFFs, Dani, from our freshman year at SCAD. That's me on the right - I made that skirt in high school out of some quilting fabric from my mom's stash. I didn't have a pattern and I don't think the skirt even had a zipper; I just pleated the fabric around my body and figured it out as I went along.

Back in those years, I made things like this all the time - cobbling together whatever fabric I could find, using a sharpie to mark my cutting lines and sometimes hand-sewing with clashing thread. Every project was an adventure. I figured out that I wanted to be a fashion designer when I couldn't afford to buy anything new, so I altered what I already had to make it special: one of my first projects was repairing some old jeans with star-shaped, contrasting denim appliques over the holes in the knees.

Lately I've been really regretting that I don't have any of my early projects anymore, or even any photos. Brilliant t-shirt surgeries, skirts and purses made out of old jeans, a skirt made out of salvaged t-shirts and then tie-dyed at camp. A crazy black t-shirt-turned-tank top with a pink flamingo appliqued on front, pink bows on the straps and sequins sewn in a star pattern on top of the flamingo. Wouldn't you love to see a picture of that?! These strange garments are such a major part of my personal history, and lately I've been really sad that they're gone.

So this time, it's going to be different. Here is where I'm going to post the pictures of everything I make, and no matter how wacky, I'll try to resist the impulse to delete the pictures. And if I do find any pictures of my past projects, I'll post them up too.

To me, the internet has always felt like the opposite of my journals (the one part of my creative output that has been consistently saved since 10th grade). The internet feels so transient, so improbable, that I've never felt bad about deleting websites and profiles when they start to feel dated. But a blog should be more like my journals: a record of how far I've come, and a piece of artwork in its own right.

colorblocky

A pillowcase I made for our new apartment.