Back Porch
“My hand-pieced quilts and many pairs of gifted mittens and socks reinforced both my connection to generations of talented women before me and the post-1970s second-wave feminism I longed to represent in my daily life and actions.” I bought it in my early twenties—a bright red cotton T-shirt with the emblem “Women’s Radical Sewing Society.” I had »
Interview
“I’m the Flag Boy. I love the position. I embrace it a lot. It is just like a whole character. It’s a spirit that takes over you on Mardi Gras Day.” Marwan Pleasant was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he grew up masking as a Mardi Gras Indian in the Golden Eagles tribe. Pleasant »
Interview
“If this was truly Student Craft and it was meant to reflect the students’ work and they were going to find joy in the process, they had to have some ownership over what was happening. So, we started with the Rainbow Baby Blanket.” Berea College, located in the foothills of Appalachian Kentucky, was founded in »
Essay
“The Loray had been in operation for almost a century, changing its products and expanding or retrofitting its buildings to meet the evolving demands of the southern textile industry.” In 1993, Bill Passmore started taking photographs of his coworkers at the Firestone plant, formerly called the Loray, in Gastonia, North Carolina. He cataloged the spaces »
Essay
The future of fashion is inside us. We will—we are—wearing nanofibers internally, purchased not from a rack, but at the grocer’s, the fishmonger’s, the restaurant. Our identities, which we have adorned with plant and animal fibers for more than three hundred thousand years, will no longer only drape over us, they will become us—worn inside. Meet Fashion »
Interview
“When one region is down, we support them, when we’re down, we receive that support.” Fibershed is a non-profit that fosters regional networks, with a stated focus to build local textile economies, grow climate-beneficial agriculture, and support education and advocacy. Project Threadways started the Southeast Fibershed affiliate to connect growers, producers, and makers across the »
Photo Essay
We came together on Sapelo Island through a vision of how heritage agriculture could help try to save a culture; we came together because Cornelia Walker Bailey had this vision, and this vision required us to work together. We started this work from the conviction that geography, culture, and history are always dyed, stitched, and »
Art
“In general, local, artisanal, values-based makers are in constant struggle to validate their craft. Textiles, especially, are up against large global labor markets that have trained consumers to buy more disposable goods for less money.” After a career as a textile buyer and production manager in New York City’s Garment District and after seeing so »
Essay
What is the future of textiles? Read news headlines, from business to environment to fashion, and you would be justified in pointing to the movement of nearly all textile production overseas, where supply chains are opaque and workers are often exploited; the prevalence of synthetic and toxic materials; and the massive and devastating volume of »
Art
In advance of the official Day of Love, we asked our pal, the Alabama-born author and illustrator Daniel Wallace, to draw some conclusions. With hearts on the brain, he climbed to the highest height, swam out to the middle of a lake, spoke with a few dogs, and tuned a banjo (twice!), all to share »
I lied. My grandmother asked if I wanted to take their portrait, and I said yes. It’s not that I didn’t like my grandparents; it’s that I don’t take portraits of strangers. Standing at the front door, I realized it was the first time I had returned to their home in Missouri in thirty years. »
The only time I remember reading about my hometown of Vicksburg, Mississippi, in my K–12 education was during my senior year Advanced Placement English class. We read The Unvanquished by William Faulkner. In the opening scene, Loosh, a man enslaved by the Sartoris family, destroys a map of Vicksburg that the Sartoris child, Bayard, had made, using »