My life is driven by stories.
This is the beginning of a story that I want to share with you.
It’s about two strangers who became friends over the internet and decided to create something together.
It’s about seeing the beauty in worn-out, imperfect things.
It’s about dreams.
I’ve been in love with textiles since I was a little girl.
Growing up, my Momma would take me to thrift shops and fabric stores.
I’d spend hours in these places walking around with my hard earned money, contemplating old clothes and yards of fabric to cut up to create the patterns I’d dreamed up from taking apart garments I had at home.
For a time I dreamed of becoming a fashion designer.
(And then I became knitwear designer. So that dream came true in a way. But that’s a story for another time…)
As I got older, I started to appreciate the history, style and construction of older clothes.
I learned about the toxic fast fashion culture and the harmful ways that most of our clothing today is produced and how much is thrown away.
I committed to only buying secondhand and US made clothing.
Then I became a curator and reseller of vintage clothing.
Which was a new kind of dream.
To be able to share this passion with others and live out this ethos of “saving the world” one dumpster of clothing at a time was a pretty rewarding (and just downright fun) thing.
Then I started learning about quilts.
Each, one-of-a-kind works of art.
Made meticulously and thoughtfully by hand.
Many, cast off and forgotten heirlooms from traditions long ago.
Each pattern holding storied meaning.
I realized that many quilts have been damaged beyond use and are cast off, unusable and undesirable because of their imperfections.
I started a personal collection of these quilts because I still saw their beauty, despite their stains and wear.
As it turned out, an internet friend named Sarah (@potters.daughter) felt a lot of the same things that I did about quilts. In fact, we started talking about our quilt love so much that she ended up having a dream about it…
That dream of hers led to me driving over 700 miles from Virginia to Alabama a few weeks later.
Her dream?
I’ll tell you more about it later this week...