ChrisHasMeInStitches

My obsessions with color and pattern started early.

When I was a child, my blue collar parents couldn’t afford the luxury of a box of 128 Crayola crayons. Luckily, a girl down the street’s parents could. I spent countless hours at her house, picking two crayons and drawing stripes next to each other to see what happened.

When I wasn’t coloring or reading science fiction, I was playing with Legos and Playskool blocks—not to make things, but to create structures: towers or patterns of streets.

What I wasn’t doing was anything my Mom would have liked me to be interested in: playing house, dressing dolls, or sewing.

It was only decades later, and after my Mom passed away, that I got pulled into embroidery, kantha, and the slow-stitching movement. I have no doubt that my first foray into using a sewing machine brought a smile to Mom’s face—and probably a plaintive remark about what took me so long!

I’ve worked in printmaking, collage, painting, and photography over the years. I love finding beauty in the ordinary, as anyone who’s seen my photo series of pavement, manhole covers, and rust can tell.

But working with fabric—and transforming scraps and ephemera—lets me express my lifelong love of color and pattern, and to make things that I hope bring a little joy to you!