V's Version

"I Am Mermaid" is finished! I will create a slide show when we get back from Festival (because the herstory and the t-shirt collection is so incredibly impressive.) I am showing the entire quilt here and just a couple of close-ups.

A few special notes of personal interest:

These are a little over half the t-shirts in the 110 shirt collection.

It is a queen sized quilt that is 7'4" x 7' 10" and it is so snuggly soft that I am kicking myself for throwing away all my old t-shirts!

The worn t-shirt tags used as the mermaid's scales are my favorite part. They are hand sewn with tiny gold beads.

Cutting up the "Lezzie Love Lives" T shirt (in her bouquet) was painful. I so wanted to steal it and hope that she wouldn't notice.

Her face is a hand silk screened logo (from the 70s?) that says "Wimmin's Land - Wimmin's Space".

The hair that is immediately around her face is a pale yellow - super-faded crackled iron-on transfer of a mermaid and waves and a sea gull.

Her tail fin is an Egyptian goddess.

I had to quilt a flower into the gun of the very militant "Killer Dyke" logo. Quilter's prerogative.

The Michfest t-shirts used are from the 8th festival in the early 80s and from the Staff T-shirt in 1993, the year that I was on the Belly Bowl Crew a week after my mother was killed. (On a related note - I especially appreciated the "Never Another Battered Woman" logo that is used as a bubble in the sea.)

The parrot was quilted especially in memory of the long time companion of Ruth (from the Main Kitchen of Michfest) who died in a motorcycle accident. Ruth cares for 17 parrots at home.

I hope Suji from Chicago likes the quilt. Something tells me that when she mailed off two huge boxes of t-shirts, she didn't expect to receive in return a mermaid swimming in seaweed.

I set out to do something I had never seen done before and I did it. I could not be happier.


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Labels: t shirt art quilt memory mermaid herstory feminist lesbian dyke history woman made products ferne