You will become dizzy

Nobody cares when I dance at the thrift store, the place where my passion begins. I can’t help but move to the Motown, disco and rock as I flip through hangers in a slot machine player’s trance. Will the next shirt be a winner? Will the next tee show an orange tabby cat riding a unicorn toward a space ship? As I flip and groove nobody seems to care. The other customers are caught up in their own dreams of what a new, old piece of clothing can bring – maybe money, confidence or love.

My passion is to cut up tee shirts printed with images and words and compose these into garments. Each piece of clothing is a self-surprise. Why does a picture of Beyonce look just right next to an animated cookie with 3D eyes? How did the sentence ‘Sometimes I wet my plants’ fit so perfectly on the back of a small sized dog jacket?

I feel that I am collaborating with the people who designed these shirt images in the first place. I am giving this clothing a second life, much like the way a furniture maker gives a second life to a tree.

Laughter inspires me, both my own and that of others. Fun clothes with funny saying pull humor out from behind the drapes of rote. Laughter stretches muscles and makes us breathe faster, hence sending more oxygen to our everything. In this respect my clothing delivers health. I believe that doctors should artfully prescribe certain culture and clothing as medicine for their patients.

Should you wear one of my garments you’ll be asked to turn around, let me see! Those near you will want you to twirl so they can watch the pictures and read the words on your clothes. As you spin, they will feel a breeze from fabric urging air. You will become dizzy, become as a child and rearrange the order of your world.

Sewing Poem:

No longer are you a raw edge

but a notch without bias

with a right and wrong side.

We gather here today to knit

our brows, selvage at a clip

and weave our way toward

the finish.

Besides using found shirts, I send my own photographs to a company that prints them onto fabric and include these images in my clothes. The pocket on a child’s dress might be the image of my mother’s jam filled cookies on a tray. The back bodice of a summer jacket may show my father, in 1966, leaning to kiss my sister’s Great Dane, Babe -- a dog who when visiting in springtime proceeded to chomp the head off every tulip in our garden. In this way my memories are carried out into the world by others. Strangers will make up their own stories out of my photographs, perhaps blending their memories with mine.

The act of sewing invites the presence of my mother who taught me how to sew at age four. I was barely strong enough to work our machine that operated by pushing a paddle the size of a small crowbar to the right with my thigh. The machine was upstairs in my parent’s bedroom where sunlight filtered through wooden shutters to make bedspread lines. When I pressed the lever with my leg, dashes of colorful thread made two things become one. The rhythm of the old Singer’s needle rising up and plunging down was an industrial age anthem. As I sewed, the machine took the fabric that flowed over the back of the sewing table like a slow waterfall. And dark stitches on light fabric became sentences longer than any by Henry James.

I continue to try out new ideas and new patterns. Lately I have been sewing entire toddler sized shirts to the front of adult dresses to be used as large pockets, the necklines being where a hand enters. I’ve also been thinking about Melody, a friend in elementary school. She had a dress with a doll sewn to the front of it and the doll faced outward wearing the exact same dress as Melody. I was thinking it would be fun to mess around with that concept. Except, not the teeth. Melody had holes through all of her teeth!