You might not know this about me, but I was a theater major for a few years in college. I was a huge highschool theater geek; the queen of the costume shop. I worked for five summers at a summer childrens’ theater and I fell in love with my husband in a truly ridiculous show where I played the Damsel in Distress and he played the giant sea monster that ate me. (It did have a happy ending.) That’s us in the photo above, right in the center.

I never wanted to be an actor; I was a designer. Sadly, I didn’t have the self-confidence I have now and when faced with the larger-than-life personalities in the department, I never found a place where I felt like I was contributing anything other than endlessly washing paintbrushes. So I drifted off and changed my major and found other creative channels.

But it was in my first class as a theater major that I met Stephen Sondheim. I don’t mean that literally of course, but the first thing we studied in “Theater Appreciation” was the musical Sweeney Todd and it was the first Sondheim musical I’d ever seen. I remember that we watched the “Great Performances” version and we had to split it up over about 3 classes to be able to see the whole thing. I sat with all of the freshman theater majors in a row in the front of the auditorium. It was a required class for theater majors and filled a humanities credit for a whole lot of other people, so we were surrounded by football players and business majors. Looking back, Sweeney seems like the strangest choice to introduce to Theater Appreciation, but I still remember it 30 years later.

I remember walking to dinner or somewhere after watching the first act of Sweeney and thinking seriously WTF. I had never seen theater like this. I am a HUGE musical theater fan. I have watched every big old Hollywood movie musical dozens of times. I think “My Fair Lady” was my first live show when I was 8 or 9 years old. I knew all the words to “Phantom of the Opera”, which all theater kids did in 1992, and the “Guys and Dolls” cast album was among the first half dozen cds I owned. I grew up in South Dakota, where touring companies don’t travel, so I didn’t see my first real Broadway show, “Thoroughly Modern Millie”, until I was an adult. This was not like those musicals.

If you don’t know the story, Sweeney Todd, in short, is a musical about a serial killer and Victorian era cannibalism. It’s creepy and full of dark humor and more than a little twisted.

So, walking back to my dorm room, I remember thinking “what is this demented thing they have us watching? This isn’t a normal musical.” and also “why haven’t I ever heard of this before?!”

It ends up that I love Sweeney Todd. I didn’t have a chance to see it live until a decade or so ago when a friend played the lead in a community theater production, but I’ve watched that same recorded version several more times and a concert version too. I’ve since discovered more Sondheim. My husband introduced me to “Into the Woods”, and I also watched the Great Performances version of that. I’ve never liked “West Side Story” although I’ve seen it a couple of times.

But my great Sondheim love is “Sunday in the Park with George”. A friend took me to see it a bunch of years ago and although I had heard of it, I really didn’t know much about it. It was breathtaking. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that the musical centers around George Seurat and at one point in the production they make the painting “Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of La Grande Jatte” come to life in a way that’s purely magical. I don’t remember a lot about that production other than liking it. I do remember very vividly going on a trip to the Art Institute of Chicago a year or so later.

I didn’t know the painting was there and I came around a corner and literally took a step backwards. It took my breath away. I stood for minutes in front of it just mesmerized.

Years later, I was contacted by the gift shop manager from the Guthrie Theater here in Minneapolis. She and I had met at an art show that I did and she had a brainstorm. Could I design some fabrics inspired by the musical they were doing for the summer and then they could carry that work in the gift shop? I jumped at the chance! She says, “You might not have heard of this show. It’s a little weird. It’s called “Sunday in the Park with George”.

So, I spent a couple of months studying it. I listened to different cast albums and watched the movie versions. I studied the painting and George Seurat. I designed a whole collection of designs inspired by elements from the show and the painting and they are some of my favorite designs I have ever done. I listened and read the lyrics to every song, looking for phrases and words to bring in to my designs. I named one design “Rue de Magenta” because that was the Paris street where Seurat had his studio. I made the black dog from the painting into one of my black labs posing to be painted.

After I had made the collection, we went to see the Guthrie’s production of course. I had tears running down my face at the moment that the “painting” snaps into place. I was a total wreck in the absolute best way possible. It was amazing.

I won’t forget those two breathtaking moments with the painting and the show. I think it’s because Sondheim and I shared a moment and understood something together about art and artists and this amazing painting. What a gift. Stephen Sondheim passed away this week and I am sorry that I won’t get to share more new moments with his art.

I saw a thing going around Instagram recently asking people to tell their stories about when they learned how to sew. Many many of them were stories about how people either learned when they were 11 years old from a family member or they learned during 2020 because it was 2020 and they decided it was time to figure it out. Both answers are pretty awesome.

So I thought about what my story would be and the answer is: I am still learning.

Just this past couple of weeks I was making a new piece for an exhibition I was invited to. It is always completely delightful to be invited to show your work and I wanted to make something new. The opportunities to get my art out there have been pretty scarce this last year because nothing was open, so there just wasn’t much demand. So I haven’t been really making exhibition pieces; I’ve been focused elsewhere.

When I make a piece for an exhibition, I usually start with a story I want to tell. I have had an idea for series of pieces in my head for a while; the story is about having conversations about mental health. As my husband and I navigated our way through the last two years, we realized that one way that we had of coping with everything going on with COVID, elections, riots, and the loss of both of our beloved Labradors to cancer was to talk about how we were feeling. And we agreed that we could talk about all of the “dumb stuff” that you convince yourself is silly: “Why am I still crying a month after my dog died? Grown-ups don’t do that.” And admitting to each other when we were each having rough mental health days. We realized that those conversations were important to helping us feel better and let go of some anxiety about the situation and the world in general. It helped to just talk about it.

So I started the first piece in the series a few weeks ago and this first one is about anxiety. Because the series is about conversations, I asked my family and a few close friends to describe to me what they thought anxiety looked like. Their images were striking: an oil slick, a never-ending waterfall, crackling blue electricity, a white hot dagger between your shoulder blades, heavy and enveloping, a dark forest with movements you can’t quite identify, a glowing red ember. I took all of those images and I created a fabric design to capture those feelings.

Next I decide what the garment is that I want to make with the fabric. I like to make garments vs quilts or other more traditional “art” objects because I enjoy sewing them. I like that the wearer can be part of the story. I like that a garment is something that people can identify with and understand because we each have so much experience with clothing. You can imagine someone wearing it. You can imagine what it feels like. That’s harder for people to do with a painting or a sculpture, I think.

Most often I get a shape in mind for a piece I want to make and I search through my large file cabinet full of mostly vintage patterns to find something that’s close to the right shape. I don’t really enjoy drafting an entire piece of clothing completely from scratch. I know how to do it, but that part of the process just really doesn’t add to the piece for me, so usually I find something that’s close and I adapt it to what I need. For this one, I wanted to capture the idea of something enveloping and heavy, so I decided to make a cape-coat out of heavy cotton sateen.

I planned, I adjusted, I cut out and I got ready to sew. And this is where I completely lost my mind. I forgot how to sew.

I don’t mean that literally, of course. I was one of those who learned how to sew when I was 8 or 9. Cinnamon Bear, who is pictured up at the very top of this post, is wearing a hand-smocked pinafore I made for her when I was 11, with help from my friend Berit. I sewed my wedding dress in my dorm room at college. My first summer job was making costumes for a local childrens’ theater. It’s pretty well in my blood.

But when I sat down to sew this coat, I made every mistake in the book. And I mean ALL of them. I think I seam ripped every single seam at one point or another. I misread directions. I reversed pieces. I misunderstood diagrams. I am not kidding; I did it all. I thought the whole thing was going to be a complete disaster and that I was a little bit losing my mind.

Even though I “know” how to sew, I was out of practice and out of rhythm. I forgot that I have a process I usually do of reading through all of the instructions and making notes before I start.  I was overconfident when I was adding extra ease stitches that the dumb pattern didn’t call for so that something would match up better when really I was sewing the pieces completely backwards. I didn’t listen to my gut telling me it shouldn’t be this hard.

In the end, the piece turned out great. I like how everything went together and I am happy with the final piece, even though it took twice as long as I thought it would. I relearned a lot of things, like remembering to slow down and read the directions, but I also learned new things. Because this was a coat and cape sort of fused together, the way that the top of the sleeve worked was ridiculously complicated and completely fascinating. I am really pleased I figured it out. It was a new-to-me fabric substrate that I chose for the piece, Spoonflower’s Longleaf Sateen Grande, which was really lovely to work with. It ended up being just slightly less drapey than I really wanted it to be, but I decided that the stiffness sort of added to the feeling of weight and enveloping/constricting that I was going for. Did it match the design idea I had in my head for this piece? Almost. The chiffon that I incorporated into the design didn’t behave in any of the ways I wanted it to, so I had to change the design. It’s not quite what I envisioned, but I adapted. It was a great reminder that learning is always a process and no matter how much you “know” something, there’s always something new to learn.