Rainbow Willow
Pattern: Willow Tank by Grainline Studio
Fabric: Nani Iro cotton gauze from Stonemountain & Daughter (Wonder world collection)
Sewn Up: Summer 2018
This fabric 100% called to me from the wall at Stonemountain & Daughter, a dreamy family-owned-for-100-years fabric shop in Berkeley.
I get very excited when things call to me, or, said another way, when I have an immediate positive reaction to something – a fabric, a song, a space – because I haven’t always been in the best touch with what I like.
In college, I ended up taking a gap year halfway through, because I didn’t know what I liked studying. Until then I had just tried to like (and excel at) everything, and while that worked okay in high school, it didn’t work in college, where, five quarters in, I was required to choose a major. I couldn’t, so I left.
While it is perhaps a cliché to move to the West Coast to find yourself at age 19, that is what I did. My dear older brother welcomed me into his sunny apartment in southern California, and for the first time in my life, I had a completely open canvas.
One of my most salient memories from soon after I arrived was an afternoon spent wandering slowly around a Target, picking up items of clothing, really looking at them, and asking myself, “do I like this?” I tried to access what I actually felt, not what I thought I should feel. I left the store with one purchase: a short A-line skirt, diagonally striped with “off-rainbow” colors – which to me means anything that’s almost a rainbow but not quite. This skirt was yellow, red, green, and gray.
I wore my new striped skirt as I navigated that next year – a spring substitute teaching in a K-8 school, a summer nannying two adorable children (who are now beautiful adults / my adopted family / featured in this post), then another school year teaching but also doing so many other things, not because anyone told me I should, but because I realized on my own that the answer to “Do I like this?” in all these cases was yes: Singing in a community choir. Learning to diagram sentences, then teaching second graders how to do it. Drawing sharpie cartoons for a French curriculum. Designing the school yearbook.
It’s been a long time since that gap year, which, as the cliché predicted, really did help me figure things out. So much of what I learned I liked then remains a part of my life now. I am still drawn to anything off-rainbow, and many things on-rainbow, like the incredible Nani Iro fabric that is now the willow tank pictured above. I still sing in a choir. My work, which I love, has a lot in common with diagramming sentences. The drawings on this site are basically digital sharpie cartoons, and this blog is basically my sewing yearbook.
There are infinite things out there to like. I am grateful to have found (and to still be finding) the subset that calls specifically to me – and I love learning about the subsets that call to everyone else.
~ Photos by Lizzie Epstein - thanks sis! ~
Drawing process reel! Closet floor photo, bus sketch, digital drawing.
