Moving Things

Oct 19 These are a wedding gift I made for my sister and her wonderful new husband. I picked up these cocktail napkins at Kane County outside Chicago in 1998. My sister wanted them back then — and I refused to give them up. Carried them around for years. Took them out after co-curating  New Embroidery: Not Your Grandma’s Doily in 2006, but still wasn’t ready to do anything to them; they felt too precious. After seeing Handmade Nation in 2009, I began embroidering over all the black lines to make them pop. Simple backstitching, but it made the pieces come to life. As Kate Bingaman Burt put it, Faythe Levine’s documentary gave me permission to experiment and try something new. So I began stitching these in a spare change approach — five minutes here and ten minutes there. Mostly during airplane travel and on the few times it did not rain during a baseball game. Showed them to Natalie Chanin last spring, who really encouraged me to make them into a quilt …  but it still didn’t feel right. They would be stuck into a format - but I felt like there was still something that needed to be done to the napkins. Then Anjali and Reagan announced that they were getting married — and I knew what the ladies needed. Tattoos. They needed to look like Portland women now. Tried at first to put tattoos from friends on there — still didn’t feel right. So I went to oddball studios, the tattoo place around the corner from home and asked for help. One of the artists there used classic Sailor Jerry tattoos as inspiration, and suggested the faded green color so it would a bit more period and in keeping with the faded colors overall. He was spot on - and made drawings that were bold and graphic but still small and curved to match the shapes of the parts being “tattooed.” And voila - here are the three lovely ladies freshly “inked” with thread - and completed just in time to be Anjali and Reagan’s wedding present. (Nearly kept them for myself!!)