A Blue Coat, indigo dyed silk and cotton, rayon, cotton string, and gold leaf, 48” x 44”, 2023

This full length, lined coat was made in Rachel D. K. Clark’s four week, online coat making class. You can find her classes here. To make the coat, I used discarded panels from my Blue Remnants series as the starting point. As it happened, one of the panels was based on an image of my grandmother and my lola at my parent’s wedding.

This led me to choose a vintage coat pattern that is very similar to a coat I inherited from my mother which she had inherited from her great aunt Minkie.

The other panel was of a boy carrying baskets full of goods bound for sale. I also incorporated some of the string I had used for tying cotton prior to dyeing.

The lining is made from a rayon fabric that I found in the remnants section at Stone Mountain and Daughter near the end of the course. It just happened to have a Southeast Asian batik inspired design in blue!