making abundance

planting seeds and saving bakery bags, letting things develop slowly

Hello from All Well!

We’re coming to you from a month of more travel (for Amelia) and more homebody-ness (for Amy). We are making sweet, slow progress on new all well projects. Here are some things we are thinking and working on, news from the all well studio, and links & recs!

A M E L I A: I’m drinking chai at a cafe in Oslo, it rained overnight and the street is damp and the sky is grey light. Adam and I are in Norway for three weeks, here to visit with artist peers, to teach workshops about making zines, and install a Climate Emergency Reading Room at Bergen Art Book Fair.

This month we’ve been visiting the Netherlands, Berlin, and Copenhagen and I’ve been capturing little sparks of creative inspiration in a photo journal for you all:

Textile prints as scarves and tapestries, hanging on the wall at Colorama / down booties in Utrecht.

Louise Bourgeois, always (Self pity, 2009, woven textile, pillow mounted in frame, at the incredible Louisiana Museum) / We dropped off some ANEMONE books for sale at Zabriskie in Berlin.

At the Living Structures exhibition there were natural dye tests, and a 3d-knit + sewn pavilion space by architect and researcher Jenny Sabin.

A M Y: The thaw happened suddenly in Pittsburgh. One day we had a few inches of snow and the next it was 65 degrees and sunny. We are used to boomerang weather around here, but it seems like the year has really turned, and I’m so glad. This winter felt long and dark, too much being stuck inside with two little boys with soooo much energy. Every member of our family thrives when we can be comfortably outside for a few hours a day. Now, the robins are hunting worms in the backyard, and we spotted the first bees finding the snowdrops and crocuses. Not so many freezing temperatures — so now it feels like it’s suddenly garden time!

I have three trays of seeds started in my kitchen, mostly flowers and tomatoes. I have lots more I’ll just sow straight into the garden once it’s warm enough, but I wanted to get a head start on some things to extend the season a little. Pittsburgh is in Zone 6b, and last year was a difficult growing season — the relentless heat made so many plants unable to proliferate the way I know they could. It wasn’t until September that things really started taking off. I don’t know if this summer will be the same or different. My garden feels like my hobby with the lowest-stakes, and I love it for that. It gets me outside, it roots me in time, it feels like an exciting experiment. Last year was my first year really trying to grow things, and I was surprised by how much joy it brought. Just looking for more of that joy. Failure can be part of that.

Here’s last year’s late season garden / this year’s kitchen seed set-up.

A M Y: One of my favorite afternoons lately was a few hours sitting on the bench on my porch outside in the sun slowly stitching an ongoing needleturn applique project I’ve been working on off-and-on for a few months. I’m just accumulating quilt blocks and trying not to plan too far ahead toward how the project will look when it is finished. It is enlivening to keep a sense of play as part of this project. Because sewing is no longer just my hobby, it’s important to me to find ways to keep it feeling personal and juicy.

And, I’ve been sewing so many toddler shorts! More Play Pants prep (the kids pants pattern we are developing). This is my favorite part of pattern drafting, I think, repeatedly sewing pattern samples. I’m a very tactile learner, so I don’t quite know how my edits to a pattern have panned out until I’ve sewn it. This kind of iterative design is so satisfying for me, though labor-intensive. Some designers may not need to sew so many samples, but I would miss it if my practice shifted away from it. And it’s helpful too, because now my toddler is fully ready with shorts for this summer!

A M E L I A: I texted Amy “I see box dress hacks” about these two 1920s Kees van Dongen paintings at the Pompidou. I’m not a big dress or skirt wearing person, but I’ve been feeling that sewing a lightweight dress might be nice this summer for lake swimming picnic days.

And I saved this bakery bag from Meyers Bageri in Copenhagen for construction inspiration for sewing bags. The single vertical seam and cute fold at the bottom! Saving an oily, cinnamon-flecked piece of paper in a ziplock for later deconstruction and measurement is totally a sewing thing to do, right? (I’m thinking it could be fun to scale it up to a tote size, and change the proportions a bit.) We went there and to Hart on the recommendations of our friends BearBear; the bakery scene in Copenhagen is excellent.

I wanted to share a picture of the smyth sewing machine in the basement at Knust, which sews book signatures together. (Here’s an animation of how smyth sewing works.) Just sharing this for when you’re having trouble threading your sewing machine or serger… we can all remember… it could be even more complicated, haha!

More inspiration for hacking the Bucket Bag (the very first All Well pattern, from 2019!!) into a tool bag.

So excited to listen to the new Lucy Dacus album, and have been enjoying reading all the press interviews she has been doing. Lucy’s thoughtfulness and emotional honesty feels refreshing in this era of polished media training. This interview was great, and there are many others!

Who has the right to have rights? / “a new threshold has been crossed”

Reading recs: Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy, The Light Eaters by Zoe Schlanger, Shopkeeping by Peter Miller, Christopher Brown’s Tropic of Kansas trilogy, and Lifehouse by Adam Greenfield.

For Norwegian people: here’s a list of the four public events and workshops Amelia and her husband Adam will be part of as ANEMONE, at Bergen Art Book Fair April 3-6. There are even book readings at the sea pools and sauna! And after the fair, we’re traveling to Gloppen to install the reading room at Trivselsskogen, where there will be an opening presentation on April 12th at 14:00, as well as a Do Plants Feel? drop-in workshop with CC and Issue Press.

Just finished reading Making Time by Maria Bowler, and this sewing related quote stood out in the chapter called Making Abundance:

Puttering around my sewing space, I fretted over wasting fabric. I started piecing one project together, then switched lanes before cutting into any fabric. I changed my mind over and over again about what to make, so I committed to nothing. I ironed. I mended an older piece. My doing self told me, “Danger! You might run out of fabric, or time, or energy. Make sure you know what you’re doing before you commit so it’s done correctly. It is so interesting that my doing self knew that throwing “waste” at me would stop me in my tracks. It sounds like such a mature thought, though it’s really a lie about scarcity in fancy clothes. It appeals to a false sense of prudence and morality. Waste fabric? How, by using it? I have piles and piles of fabric in my studio. Most of it is thrifted, some of it I bought over the years. […] I’m not exactly working with priceless artifacts. All that unused stuff I’ve hoarded for this exact purpose, and there I was, afraid to make a real piece out of it.

And this too:

“How dare you create when the world is on fire?” All your compassion, sensitivity, and imagination twists itself. “How dare you create [goodness, truth, beauty] when it doesn’t fix all this?” I say this with love: How dare you not. [...] Don’t use the fact of evil, of war makers and legislators of injustice, as a reason not to create what was not there before. Do not reject the way your humanity throws off sparks of light because there is always darkness. Truth and beauty are not frivolous. Creating is responsible, and responsibility is not grim. It is a gift to be alive. You do not serve the world with frantic action, but with your highest intelligence. You do not serve the world by withholding.

— Amelia and Amy