But honestly, I don’t want to talk about it much more, so I made a video expressing some of the trauma that this quilt helped me to see and release. All music, except the final song from a friend’s band (Philomena- by Shrugs), was made by me during my teens an early twenties while in active drug addiction.
Trigger warning: distressing audio and uncomfortable movement
Catharsis, letter from grandmother, fabric from aunt:
My Matriarchy (PC: Grace McLarty)
10B: RADICAL
FWJD Website (PC: Grace McLarty)
This website is an ongoing process that I hope to continue through the years. Please check it out here:
Gearing up for future projects about reimagining housing. Every human deserves a hearth.
Amelia’s beautiful paragraph that connects to what I want to explore in regards to domesticity and ancestral healing:
By manipulating women’s relationships with food, twisting it so that it is something to run from, not to, patriarchal forces are actively weakening female communities and connections. By healing this wound and returning to the natural power women hold as universal creators, in the kitchen and everywhere else, you are reclaiming what the patriarchy has sought to steal away from you. This is much easier said than done, of course, and I am just in the beginning stages of doing this. However, looking into my own cultural background with food, as well as the experiences of other women, has been an incredibly impactful first step. By deepening ones own connections with food and cooking, you are creating a tie that will be increasingly hard for diet culture to sever. Food is bounty, fertility, love, joy, food is the most sacred aspect of the human experience. Eating and enjoying food is an ancient act of self love, one that connects you to the people and communities you come from, while actively pushing you towards those in the future. Delighting in the hedonistic pleasures of food, following your nose and tongue through a meal, eating with your hands, belly laughing between bites, all are revolutionary acts against the patriarchy. That is the biggest lesson I have taken away from this year as a whole. Our ancestors have suffered too much starvation and pain for us to be concerned with how much weight we have gained in a time of global crisis, or how pleasing our bodies look for men who will never be satisfied. Eat and be merry, if not for yourself, for your great great great grandmother who wishes she could.
Amelia Pressman “A Reflection”, 2021
10D: MAKING
Taking a break from quilts, making other things for now.
More Shibori (PC: Grace McLarty)
Took some photos for a friend the other day, it was nice to branch out to my other hobbies and take a step away from the trauma of the quilt.
Grace McLarty (she/her) is a mixed-media and fiber artist who has been exploring the themes if addiction, trauma, sexual abuse, queerness, and intersectional feminism since 2014. Inspired by the strength and wisdom of grandmothers and all others before her who have practiced crafts that could be considered “women’s work”, she has been focusing on the art of quilting during COVID in an effort to create a soft and gentle space, both physically and emotionally. Her current quilt focuses on examining her own European heritage in an attempt to better understand her place in the world as well as address racism, classism, and sexism in her familial history and in her personal life in order to start the process of grieving, healing, and creating a more socially just world. In this same piece, she confronts issues such as the housing crisis in Olympia, alternative housing solutions, and the meaning of hearth and home as well as coming to terms with coming out as queer, abuse and trauma, and drug and alcohol addiction. Improvisational yet intentional, her work aims to weave together a collectively traumatic history, a healing and meditative present, and a radically different future.
9B: RADICAL
Art Show (PC: Franny McLarty)
9C: HOME
The hearths I focused on for my quilt:
9 Hearths (PC: Grace McLarty)
Had Caleb over for a homework session, he brought beet sprouts and hazelnuts and I made cold brewed Pu-Erh tea and a fruit and cheese spread.
Hostess (PC: Grace McLarty)
9D: MAKING
Finishing Touches (PC: Grace McLarty)
Quilting and Embroidery (PC: Grace McLarty and Cam C.)
fwjd video, embroidery, making more quilt blocks, starting border, made the curtains and continued the eternal dye project, artist brainstorm, embroidery, embroidery, and finally decided on a border and made a quilt sandwich
8B: RADICAL
Worked with Maddi to make a video for the food/ag pathways party.
The Evergreen Shellfish Garden (PC: Grace McLarty)
Craving seafood and connecting to my community.
Highlights: Oyster tasting, experimenting with dyes, and making quilt blocks.
7B: RADICAL
What’s more radical than restoring the puget sound and connecting with your community!??!
Community Connections! (PC: Grace McLarty)
Shuckin’ Away (PC: Grace McLarty)
Yum! (PC: Caleb Poppe)
Flavor Combinations (PC: Grace McLarty)
7C: HOME
Mendning (PC: Grace McLarty)
Trying to get my own house in order, mending a favorite dress, experimenting with dyes for curtains, collecting rugs to create a runner for the stairs.
Failed Shibori Dye Experiment (PC: Grace McLarty)
Tried to bleach these neutral colored curtains into a shibori pattern of light brown and bright white- turns out I just bleached them white.
Dyeing with zoe, dinner with zoe and caleb, main focus is deciding on a quilt pattern and natural dyeing.
6B: RADICAL
Drawing on inspiration from the women of Gee’s Bend. Looking up histories of log cabin quilts and what they symbolize. Watched the Handmaid’s Tale, and how quilts used to be modes of communication.
Gee’s Bend Quilts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018 (PC: Grace McLarty)
log quilt inspiration from old book plus me playing around with patterns:
Log Cabin Experiments (PC: Grace McLarty)
A log cabin quilt block is supposed to have a red center, symbolizing the hearth, or a yellow center, symbolizing a window. It is usually surrounded by light and dark fabrics, to represent the sun and shadows within a home. None of these are rules. I am going to try to use red in the center of each block to symbolize the most important hearths in my past and present.
7C: HOME
Hearth, 2021 (PC: Grace McLarty)
Having people in my home, working with fellow students, building community
Please no more therapy
Mother take care of me
Piece me together with a
Needle and thread
Wrap me in eiderdown
Lace from your wedding gown
Fold me and lay me down
On your bed
Polaroids, Shawn Colvin
Whenever I have a really bad mental health week, like this one, I find comfort in my Aunt Shawn’s music. This song, Polaroids, held me through my time in boarding school as a teenager and is now holding me as my move into yet another new space. This quote calls to me this week especially; the idea of being taken care of, wrapped in fabrics. My grandmother has used her old Singer sewing machine for forever and would make me clothes and bed linens. My grandmother has been sewing all her life and has mended so many of my clothes throughout the years. This reminds me to read My Grandmother’s Hands: Radicalized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem.
This week I have been focusing on moving more of my stuff out of my old house and settling in to this new space. I have also picked up extra shifts at work in an attempt to cover rental costs while I search for a roommate. I feel hopeless and overwhelmed.
At Work (PC: Val)
This was also FWJD week! Check out the website I built:
One idea I have about making this space more affordable is having a collective fiber arts studio in the basement. People could pay a small amount to have access to a set up work space, sewing machine, fabric and thread… The idea is great but I am not sure the logistics would work in the time of Covid.
4C: HOME
The housing crisis makes me angry.
“Assuming you have a 20% down payment ($74,800), your total mortgage on a $374,000 home would be $299,200. For a 30-year fixed mortgage with a 3.5% interest rate, you would be looking at a $1,344 monthly payment. Please keep in mind that the exact cost and monthly payment for your mortgage will vary, depending its length and terms.” Mortgagecalculatorplus.com
The landlord is charging $500 per month more than the mortgage, I don’t know too much about all of this. I just got in way over my head and now need to figure out what to do.
4D: MAKING
Tastes of my place (PC: Grace McLarty)
I am making a home. That’s what I am focusing on. I plan on tying together the act of putting together a house and the ideas behind radically homemaking in later posts. For now, the only thing I can focus on is making my place feel safe.
Wow so I signed a lease on a house that I can’t afford this week. It was a huge jump for me to take, and I am so happy to be leaving the old house. This is my fourth move of this year, not including helping my divorcing parents move AND my best friends divorcing parents move. I am sick of carrying my stuff up and down random staircases. But I think I am finding a good home base.
This week I fell behind with working and with the craziness of moving in to a new house. But I was able to focus on drawing inspiration from gee’s bend and grace rother. I havent been able to do much reading or practical work due to the move but it will all come together soon.
drawing connections through all parts of life – definitely spending this week finishing up the gift quilt and mentally preparing to take on this highly personal project
Knots (PC: Grace McLarty)
What am I cooking? What am I eating? mostly iced tea and chocolate.
3B: RADICAL
write about how these ppl inspire me in the realm of radical fiber arts
My theme this was was the love language of gift giving. My sister came to visit me from Bellingham and my life was filled with love for the first time in months. She gifted me a book on yoga, and I gifted her a tea set and some nice chocolate bars. Our mother’s main love language is gift giving, and she gave me a sewing machine last month.
most of what I did this week was hang out with my sister, work on fwjd, and die from the covid vaccine, and come to terms with the fact that i dont want to sell my quilts and that my time doesnt always have to have money attached to it.
“Making a quilt takes months of work. Years if you include finding garments and reclaiming them for fabric (which is largely how I source the fabric for my quilts). It is close, intimate, big, fussy, skilled work. The finished piece always contains a bit of me, my brain, my heart, a few chapters of my life. It is gutting to share that with the world and have folks make offhand remarks about it being too expensive. Rather than build up a thick calloused skin about my work, I’ve decided to set a boundary to protect my tenderness about it, because I want to be able to stay tender towards it” Grace Rother
lets talk alternative economic models!
History of home, also an exploration into economics, the commons, land, ownership, etc.
2D: MAKING
Rainbow Strip (PC: Grace McLarty)
The practical hand work that I do, all leading up to a virtual showcase of my story quilt.
Top Work (PC: Grace McLarty)
2E: ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Rother, Grace. “Grace Rother”. How to buy a quilt. [Website] https://gracerother.com/howtobuyaquilt
McLarty, Grace and Maddi Parvankin. “José Gómez Farmworker Justice Day”. [Website] https://wordpress.evergreen.edu/farmworkerjusticeday/
During the break I tried to find ways to stay soft and tender towards myself and the changes I have undergone in the past few months. I spent entire days in bed attempting to rest and recover. But the actual practice of resting seemed impossible due to the guilt that comes with not using your time to produce money under the capitalist system. One of my goals this quarter is to try and break free from the idea that my time, my art, and my mental health all need to be focused on generating income. I am not quite there yet and I spent most of my time hand stitching a quilt, trying to improve my skills so I can make marketable products in the future.
My quilting project started out as a gift for a friend’s child, and over the course of the 10 weeks it took me to sew it, I formed a special bond with it. The energy put into the quilt was restless and stressed, with entire sections filled with triggering memories and pain. In the end, the quilt holds too much of my own past trauma to be given to a newborn. I decided to keep it and use it as the base for a soft and gentle space. A reminder that my past can have the power to hold and heal me, as I lay on top of it in the sun.
Complete (PC: Grace McLarty)
Above is the finished quilt. It doesn’t have a name quite yet, but when I look at it and hold it I am amazed. It still freaks me out that every single stitch was done by hand. Maybe I was on the edge of a mental breakdown but in the end all that energy was converted to this soft bulk.
During week one I focused on collecting my library for this quarter, designing the José Gómez Farmworker Justice Day website, and planning for the quilt I will make this spring. It was a chaotic week, but I am satisfied with all the work I got done.
Framing Texts (PC: Grace McLarty)
These are the books I hope to explore during this quarter. I will go into more detail in the following sections.
1B: RADICAL
Framing Texts (PC: Grace McLarty)
One of the books I am most excited to read this quarter is Radical Homemakers by Shannon Hayes.
“Radical Homemakers are men and women who have chosen to make family, community, social justice, and the health of the planet the governing principles of their lives. They reject any form of labor or the expenditure of any resource that does not honor these tenets. For about five thousand years, our culture has been hostage to a form of organization by domination that fails to honor our living systems, where ‘he who holds the gold makes the rules.’ By contrast, Radical Homemakers use life skills and relationships as a replacement for gold, on the premise that he or she who doesn’t need gold can change the rules. The greater our domestic skills, be thet to plant a garden, grow tomatoes on an apartment balcony, mend a shirt, repair and appliance, provide for our own entertainment, cook and preserve a local harvest or care for our children and loved ones, the less dependent we are on the gold.” pg 13, Radical Homemakers, Shannon Hayes
I have been highlighting this whole book like a crazy person because everything she says really resonates with me, but I am also starting to realize that this book was written by a white woman for white women. I am looking forward to finishing this book and gaining a basic understanding on the subject of radical homemaking and moving on to books and media by people who have different perspectives. I do believe Shannon Hayes is radical at heart, but some of the language she uses can be exclusive and I am also having trouble with her romanticising colonialism. She is currently writing a sequel to Radical Homemakers and I plan on reaching out to her via email this quarter to see if this new volume will address more social justice issues.
1C: HOME
Silvia Federici and George Monbiot are my inspiration in my exploration of economic alternatives to capitalism and the history behind domesticity, enclosure, the commons, and the nuclear family unit. Over the break, I listened to George Monbiot’s lecture at the Schumacher Center for New Economics while binding my quilt. I was so intrigued that I bought his book, Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life.
He talks about how kids who are brought up in green spaces do better than those who grow up surrounded by hard surfaces, such as concrete which I related to my interest in the softness of fiber art. He talks about how there is a lot of land in the UK is used solely for hunting grouse, which reminded me of our collective hunt last quarter for our own personal “grouse”. Perhaps Monbiot’s ideas surrounding land, ownership, and reclaiming the commons are my grouse.
1D: MAKING
Framing Texts (PC: Grace McLarty)
At the beginning of this quarter, I applied for the FPMTQSS Material Grant for Creators in hopes of getting essential supplies to create story quilt. The aim of the grant is to assist people in creating a piece of work that explores social justice issues, LGBTQIA, BIPOC, or disabled identities to be shown in a virtual showcase on 5/28/2021.
Material Grant Flyer (Photo Credit: FPMTQSS Facebook Page)
My application laid out a plan to create a quilt that attempts to tell my story. My past is something that I generally avoid looking at because of shame and pain, and because of that I don’t feel like I have a strong sense of identity, purpose, or confidence. By creating this quilt, I hope to weave together my painful history with addiction, sexual trauma, and abuse as well as explore my own sexuality and gender identity, my ancestry and heritage, and how I can use fiber arts and radical domestic work as a catalyst for creating a socially just and sustainable future for myself and my community.
Story Quilt Timeline (PC: Grace McLarty)
I am spending the first few weeks gathering materials and getting in touch with the theme I have chosen. I will be looking at lots of old journals and artwork and doing lots of experimenting. I also decided to make the switch from hand piecing the blocks together to using a sewing machine for the blocks and only doing the quilting by hand. I was against using a sewing machine for years, partially because I viewed it as cheating but mostly because I was scared that I wasn’t capable enough to learn how to use it. With the help of my little sister, I was able to learn how to use the machine and sew my first block in about 30 minutes. Does this make me a capitalist? Stay tuned.
Sewing Machine! (PC: Grace McLarty)
1E: ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hayes, Shannon. Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture. Left to Write Press, 2010.
Schumacher Center for New Economics. (2020, October 25). Private Sufficiency, Public Luxury: Land is the Key to the Transformation of Society [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63WSvrquIPU
