Meat Textiles - A Fabric Story

I have been spending a lot of time in the sewing room, trying to replace all the merchandise I sold at Indy Blooms, Midwest Model Mayhem, and via internet sales. I found some really nice and colorful new fabrics last week.

Isn't fabric this pretty? (I'm tempted to keep it for myself.) I made a Traditional pouch

and an Extra Long Traditional from it. (XLT) 

I was actually searching for a flamingo fabric a customer had requested when I found these brightly colored fabrics. I made a Traditional to sell

and an XLT for the customer. This flamingo fabric reminds me of a summer evening.

Finally, I made two XLTs from this fabric.

XLTs fit Contantina, the Cleveland Bay, Shagya Arabian, and other of Breyer's longer models.

I often get asked as to where I get my fabrics. The answer? Everywhere and anywhere. I even search state by state for mom and pop/locally owned fabric stores which is how I found those fabrics above. Most of the time I don't find anything new, sometimes I do, and other times, I am utterly taken aback as to what can be found in a fabric shop.

Here's a quick story about the latter.

One place I get recommendations on where to find fabric is from friends. One of my fellow musicians from my opera days, Charis Bean Duke, is just as an accomplished sewist as she is a professional musician. 

Charis buys a lot of her fabric from abroad and shares those links with me.  The British shop fabric godmother web site, though, turned out to be an eyebrow raiser.

It looked totally normal, but when doing a search for horsey fabrics, I discovered that they carried fabrics that were very realistic meat prints. There was a disclaimer that said:

It needed that disclaimer because onsite photos of those cabbage leaves, veggies, and especially the sides of raw beef absolutely, 100% looked real. And yet, it was all fabric. A little taken aback, I wondered who would want to buy fabric like that? Maybe film and theater companies would want foods for filming and performances that would not spoil? Those meat textiles were realistic enough for that!

Those textile food pictures made me feel a little sick, but they also made me smile. Why? In an opera that Charis wrote and I performed in, we were using fake food in it, although ours was plastic, not fabric. And that fake food led to a near disaster between Music City Son Cole and me during the performances. The irony and the connection back to our opera days made me smile.

One last mini fabric story, just for fun. Charis also does needlework and gifted me with this embroidered picture she made and framed for me (barn wood!) several years ago. 

Anyone else think that Marabella might have been the model for the horse?

Back to the sewing room to enjoy my fabrics with pretty horses and ponies on them and no meat textiles in sight!

Horsey Art in My Home #2

Needlework, as anyone who has tried it can attest, is difficult and, when done with a practiced hand, a form of art. I can sew, and I can embroider, but I have no patience for counted cross stitch. The meticulous, tiny stitches as well as the need to count, count, count constantly is more than I am up to. (I've tried it, and I simply cannot keep all the counting straight.)

My friend, Charis, however, loves to do counted cross stitch, and she does beautiful work. She's actually a composer, and we met when she and her husband (an opera singer) were studying at The University of Illinois. I was lucky enough to be invited to sing in an opera group she put together, and we performed music, including some that she wrote, all over town. Heady times!

(Photo credit to David Duke.)

 Not just a pianist, Charis plays several reed instruments and the cello.

(My best musical honor was that, when she wrote the Christmas opera, The Inkeeper's Wife, she wrote the role of Mary for me. It had a high B flat that I stressed over for weeks, but in the end the opera came together beautifully and I will never forget the feeling of having music written especially for my voice and then the opportunity to perform it in front of audiences. More heady times!)

ANYWAY.

Charis and David (NOT the David Duke who has been in the political news recently) were the proverbial "poor as church mice" college students. Newly wed and both in graduate school, both performing, and in need of money, Charis and I struck up a deal - she'd come to my home and teach all six of our kids piano lessons. In exchange, and since I was a stay at home mom with a large family, she gave me a cut rate in the cost of those lessons by bringing her laundry and having me do it. Win-win!

Since she was frequently at our home teaching my children or I was in a rehearsal of some sort with her for our opera group, Charis and I spent a lot of time together and have remained friends over the years even though she and her family moved on to other musical endeavors. (Go here for her Facebook composer page.) She knew of my love of horses, and one day just a few years ago, an unexpected package arrived for me.

Inside was an intricately detailed counted cross stitched picture of Father Christmas and a horse. There was a note on the back that she had been working on it for years (a decade!) whenever she could find the time, had finally finished it, and had had it framed in barn wood as a final nod to my horsey-ness.

Any other Breyer collectors out there see a similarity to Breyer's 2004 Christmas Horse?

(Photo from Identify Your Breyer.)

Charis started her cross stitched piece in 1997 and Breyer's piece came out in 2004, so it is only coincidental, but I still smile when I look at it.

My kids are not overly fond of horses, but I know that this artwork will be one that they ALL want to inherit since it was done by Charis, a woman our entire family loves.