Tell me about your grandmother. What was she like, and how would you describe her style?
She was very warm, very gentle, and she had a wonderful laugh. She loved to celebrate and to dance, and she loved holidays. She played the accordion, too.
In her 20s, she’d worked as an executive secretary for a company in Minneapolis, and she was very proud of that work. I got to know her when she was already peak grandma in the ’90s, so as far as I remember, she was always very coordinated, but also very casual. She would wear slacks with an elastic waistband and a sweatshirt, maybe with a decorative pattern. And she always wore Reebok princess shoes in either black or white. She had many boxes of those in her closet. My mom remembers her wearing much more tailored clothing—like a skirt suit with a matching jacket, gloves, and hat. She would likely have made all of these things because she was a really expert home sewer. As far as my mom knew, she didn’t subscribe to Vogue, but she probably bought Vogue patterns in the fabric store and used those to make some of the tailored outfits that she wore.
Do you know what prompted your grandmother to start collecting skirts?
She started collecting much later in life, and she collected far beyond what she could actually wear. So I think she was collecting for the love of wool skirts, honestly—and so that future generations would have access to beautiful, high-quality wool.
How did the idea to document her skirt collection come about?
She died in 2022 at 99; she lived a really long life. At that point, the skirts were in boxes in my parents’ garage, and they had been there for 10 years. We were left with the question, “What to do with all of them?” Using a couple of skirts, I ended up weaving a square-foot sample to see how much rag rug we could weave with the collection if we chose to do that. A thousand square feet. That’s a lot of rag rug.
Opening the boxes forced us to confront the fact that the collection has value beyond weaving material; it has a lot of historical value, too. As the decades have passed, that historical value has grown. So we laid out two boxes of skirts in the driveway, took a look, and were really amazed. We saw skirts with International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union labels, which you don’t see anymore; lots of Pendleton labels, which is the high mark of the American woolen industry; a Christian Dior label, which was really surprising to us. I’m not sure if it was an actual Christian Dior skirt, but who knows?
