So I've started making these collages. They're made of fabric scraps and I paint on top of them. I sew all day most days and sometimes I just want to cut up fabric and glue it down on to a page.

Collage. September 2020.

This is something I started doing during the pandemic. yarn&whiskey was born in January 2020. I think I'd released two drops of project bags by the time lockdown happened and I pivoted to making masks that I gave away for free for a good long while. I fell into making in those days. I thought it was a way to help.

At the end of those days of sewing masks I would often make a little collage using that day's fabric scraps on index cards I seemed to have an endless amount of for some reason. I stored the collages away in a cigar box and kind of forgot about them until I saw an exhibition of Sonia Delunay's work at The Bard Graduate Center.

One of the things I took away was the way she branded herself through her paintings of her fashion collections. I thought her paintings were charming and the kind of thing a the person receiving it would take notice of and save. The paintings looked like they were quickly done and effortless. I thought of my little collages in a cigar box. From that day on, I started sending a little collage with every online purchase from my shop. Thank you Sonia Delaunay.

Collages sent to customers. April 2025.

I have so many fabric scraps. They're organized by color. Sometimes I think about letting some of this stuff go, but I haven't been able to get to that place yet. So I keep making collages. Recently, I've been writing myself messages with them.

Vote Collage. November 2024

I started writing messages in my sketchbook around the election, but recently I've moved on to bigger canvases with more intricate things happening in the ground. It's just another way for me to put fabrics together. It's a thing I seem to need to do. There's something about clashing and coalesences that turns on a light for me.

Black Joy is Eternal. May 2025

The other day, I sat down to make a collage with the message "Black Joy is Eternal". I'd had this phrase on my mind for awhile now. Maybe it started when Kendrick dropped GNX and "Wacced Out Murals", but when I heard 2rawtooreal say it on IG the other day, I thought, "Yeah. It's in the air. Everybody knows." And the night of the Met Gala centered on Black style seemed like the perfect time to work. The fabric I was cutting up had diamond motifs on a periwinkle ground. I had used this fabric recently for bags and had saved a piece to use in a collage. While working on this one, I was thinking about how wax prints represent colonalism. This is a fabric that was created to undercut the Javanese fabric market. The fabric was rejected by that market. The fabric was then brought to West Africa. I recently heard someone use the words "dumped there" to describe it. I had never thought of it that way because I had bought into the myth that a Ghanian soldier liked the fabric and took it back home. That does seem unlikely. Look at how the world dumps their textile waste on Africa today. And look at how that fabric has replaced a lot of the traditional methods of creating textiles in many regions. And industrialization of a lot of different industries replaced traditional methods of doing lots of things all over the world. There are some other things that are kinda of eternal, too, it seems. We're all participating in and collaborators in systems.

This fabric represents colonialism. Hate the system, but I appreciate these fabrics for their designs. This fabric has diamonds on it and I thought about how we as Black people are diamond-like ourselves. As I cut up the strips of fabric, I thought, We are a fragmented people spread out all over the world. I jotted down these words on the bottom of the page: "This fabric is us. We are fractured diamonds. Every one of us. But we are still here. And one day we're all gonna come together. The Dawn of a New Age. May U Live 2 See the Dawn."

That last line, I got from Prince and wondered if that what's he meant.

Whatever, tho. It's nice seeing these hanging in my studio. They are reminders. My notes to self.