My Fabric Timeline & The Memory of Fabric Project

A new camera has arrived (yay!) and I am so pleased with how it takes photographs and records video. I really think this is going to elevate my new creative project The Memory of Fabric.

Originally, the Memory of Fabric was called Stitching Stories. The objective was to collect approximately 6 oral histories from local people about their relationship to sewing and stitching. After some thinking, I decided I wanted to expand this project in order to map out a geography of memory defined by the fabric in our everyday lives - whether that’s making fabric, wearing fabric, remembering people/places/animals through fabric - I had this artistic desire to archive these stories, in addition to my own. Therefore, Stitching Stories has evolved to the Memory of Fabric.

I see this project as a variety of things: oral histories, digital archive, and creative expression all rooted in the all the stories connected to the making, wearing and remembering of fabric that knit together a geographic landscape of cultural memory. What better way to track this project then dedicate a webpage on my site as well as allow it to act as an archive for a lot of this work?

With that, you can watch my introductory video about this project here. (And remember I am VERY new to filming and editing, so it’s not the highest quality…but I’m learning!).

You can also check out the webpage for the project here as well as the fabric timeline archive. My hope is to create a digital repository of different fabric timelines that highlight the meaning of fabric in our personal memories. I even created a blank PDF if you want to print it out and fill it out yourself!

And with that, I’ll leave you with a few photographs from my winter walk with Birdy the other day. We finally have plenty of snow and the midwinter woods are my favorite place to be.

Andrea