Fibers: Soft Sculpture & Apparel

My fiber work began as a child, experimenting with embroidery and cross-stitch and expanded to tailoring or modifying clothing and sewing plush characters. I began collecting vintage and antique textiles in 2010 and used the fabric to construct garments, curtains, and soft sculptures. Learn more about my visual language here.

Below is a selection of fiber work completed from 2014-2024.

Tufted Rugs

The woven and knotted construction of antique rugs has inspired my visual language. I studied my small collection of vintage rugs and made a small hand-knotted sample in 2020. I finished a machine tufted rug in 2023, but I dropped the practice because working with the tufting machine became too physically demanding.

I collaborated with Tuft the World from 2023-2024 to produce a series of limited edition rugs for Tigerbob and a few based on my hand drawn tattoo designs.

Apparel

I started hand-piecing and hand-quilting a garment from vintage Japanese fabric as early as 2015. The unfinished project became a sketch book for aesthetic, material, and process. The logo for Gossamer Rozen was derived from the hand-stitched tag on this piece.

Inspired by meeting designers Emily Bode and Mia Vesper in 2019-2020, I created a line of cut/sewn apparel from my collection of vintage quilts and fabric in 2020. My intention was to scale up my garment production by upcyclng existing quilts instead of piecing the work myself by hand.

I based my designs on simple square shapes inspired by Japanese clothing to reduce as much textile waste as possible. Hand stitched quilting is inspired by boro aesthetic, sashiko, and quilts from Pakistan and Bengal. Learn more about the inspiration for my apparel and the textiles used here.

I ceased making cut/sew apparel because I do not prefer to use the sewing machine and hand-stitched details are physically demanding.

This apparel line became inspiration for the Tigerbob made-to-order fashion line, which debut in 2023. Learn more here.

Curtains

I designed and created two curtains from Japanese textiles. The pieces are inspired by patchwork Korean bojagi techniques and stained glass. I was interested in creating a patched piece of fabric finished on both sides, where seams become line work like lead piping in stained glass. I was interested in the translucency created by the variety of different textiles and its dual look during night or day.

One particular artist who inspired this work is Adam Pogue.

Works were made approximately 2016-2019.

Soft Sculpture

Designing and hand stitching plush toys and objects was the forefront of my textile explorations as a child and into adulthood.

These hand stitched fish were created from 2014-2019. I have been fascinated by the way fish glimmer in the water from above as a child, growing up visiting a trout hatchery and fishing with my parents. I wanted to recreate the feeling of these animals with cloth. Construction is inspired by cloisonne articulated fish and puppetry.

I had a goal to create a lot of more of these pieces and suspend them in a room, perhaps using automata techniques to make them move. However the pieces were very time-consuming to complete and hand stitching was physically demanding, so I ceased making them in 2019. Perhaps I will find a time in the future when I can revisit the project.