Considered Cloth: My History With Textiles

Textiles: why I am compelled to weave, stitch, spin, dye

My Brief History With Textiles

At the age of 10, my mother and I moved to Union, South Carolina. It was the early 1980's and the image below brings a distant memory back to life. Buffalo Mill was one of the primary employers of the parents for many of my friends from school. I vividly remember driving past this mill on a regular basis, not knowing what transpired behind the brick walls, or the history of King Cotton in South Carolina, or the racial injustices that were a part of industrialized production of cloth, or labor in the South. I was just a kid from the North, a Yankee, something I was reminded of daily by some of my classmates.

Buffalo Cotton Textile Mill, Mill Building, SC Route 215, Buffalo, Union County, SC

I lived on a row of houses that were originally built for the mill workers. The particular house I lived in originally did not have indoor plumping or a kitchen. These rooms were added on later. The house was meant to fit two families, the pre-cursor to a duplex, but closer to indentured servant quarters. I was too young to pay too much attention to all of this at the time, and gleefully wandered the street, looking for other kids to play some sort of game, or sneak over to the other side of the street to shop at the candy store.

A present day mill house near Laurens Mill, Laurens, South Carolina.

Many people who find themselves weaving cloth today may do so from an interest in historical production or from a sense of nostalgia. Maybe they have an important family member (most likely a grandmother, aunt, etc.) that inspired their journey into textile processes such as knitting, crocheting, sewing, quilting, etc. While I, too, had a very influential grandmother who sewed clothes for me, I never felt compelled to explore textiles as a creative practice. When I arrived to art school, my goal was to escape any association with textile making as understood the hard labor of industrialized production. Long hours, unstable and unreliable income as workers were either working around the clock or not at all did not sound like a future I wanted to embrace. Yet, fast forward to my second semester at the School of the Art Institute, where I found myself surrounded by a sea of floor looms, immersed in a language of process and material that has captivated me ever since. After undergraduate studies, I worked as a production weaver for a selection of designers where I further explored compu-dobby design weaving and became a proficient producer of complex cloth. During graduate studies at Arizona State University, I foresaw my career as an educator working as a graduate teaching assistant. I followed this path of teaching serving as a visiting professor several years later at my graduate alma mater where I had the privilege of teaching students in all the forms of fiber art in addition to my first passion of weaving. While my career has taken me across the country and provided me with many experiences in the art world, I secretly longed to launch my own business where I share the world of weaving and all things fiber to the world. Considered Cloth aims to do just that, enticing people to fall down the rabbit hole with me and explore the multitude of processes associated with textiles including dyeing, spinning, sewing, weaving, etc.

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