Monthly Archives: July 2016

Fabric Aging

Leftover fabric from curtains for old house.

Starting a new project with leftover aged curtain fabric, postponed due to broken power cord.

I like to buy fabric with the ambition of doing a project that day, but realistically the fabric sits in a box with my sewing supplies for two or more years. Fabric, to work properly, has to age you see. For example I have six yards of blue velvet that I purchased to make Christmas dresses for my three daughters, about eight years ago. It should make fantastic dresses, however since all three girls have grown in the last eight years, 6 yards is more the quantity I’d need to make them all skirts, well, realistically mini-skirts. But if I wait another eight years, I’ll only have one daughter living at home and I could use the 6 yards to make a dress.

But that daughter hates velvet and wouldn’t wear the 16-year aged vintage fabric. I’ll have to rethink this plan.

Another project was material I bought to make curtains for my daughter’s navy bedroom. The fabric was aged only a short year, when it became time to sell the house. Not to let the pale blue, with Asian-inspired dark blue trees printed fabric go to waste, after only two hours of labor I had the curtains made and hung. I enjoyed them for the last month we lived in that house. Of course I was so busy moving, performing (it was December) and packing that I only looked at them two or three times.

For my new house, one of my daughter’s rooms has a uncovered, west-facing, half-circle window, deadly in Austin summers. I’ve purchased the material, purple velvet (her pick, not mine) and have folded it neatly to age in a box next to my other fabric supplies. They can impart their wisdom of the years and their despair of ever being anything other than fabric. While I’ll contemplate the difficulty of hanging fabric on a round curtain rod.

Police Shootings – Give Us a Voice Not Violence

IMG_1390I’m horrified by the recent attacks on police officers in Baton Rouge and Dallas. I recognize that there are injustices in the executive and judicial systems of the United States, but violence is not the way to protest violence.

The time is ripe for the right voice, the voice that speaks for the pains and anguish of peoples too long oppressed. That voice will not be heard coming from behind the muzzle of a rifle. That voice will not be heard from an angry man shouting, “It’s not fair!” to an uncaring world. That voice will be heard from the mothers crying for their lost sons, husbands, daughters and fathers. That voice will be heard from a thousand heartfelt stories of how I was treated in school, at my job, on the street and even in my home, because my skin was a different color than another, because my race was different from someone else’s race.

We do judge, we do prejudge, we show prejudice. We cannot ignore hundreds of years of history between our peoples. We cannot ignore the brutality that brought many of the African Americans here to the United States. We must acknowledge the choices that our ancestors made and we must choose a different path. We must choose to overcome our internal judges, our own prejudices. We must choose to overcome our instincts to fear what isn’t us, what we perceive isn’t us. We are us.

The greatest lie is that there is an us and a them. We all hurt, we all cry, we all fear, but we also can grow. We can build, we can overcome, we can change. Give us the chance, show us the path to healing. Tell us the words that your hearts are aching to say. Tell us the words that the past has buried so deep that all that is left is pain, fear and violence. We can listen, we can change. We must. It is time.