I’ve quilted an essay using cotton fabric hand-treated with cyanotype. The focus is the niche history of department store restaurants and how a female patronage and workforce inadvertently created a rare feminine luxury under strict social mores at the time of its invention. I combined many labors: constructing narrative from archival research, treating and exposing cotton, machine-piecing 24 unique pages, and binding the story together with a handsewn spine. The phrase Glamour is an Onion comes from a post serendipitously found on an appliance repair forum that pivoted to discussing menus from department store restaurants past, like Field’s in Chicago or Younker’s in Des Moines. Learning that women were unable to dine alone in public contextualized how novel these eateries were. The study of this lost history is made archival, real, and permanent by producing negatives and prints made on fabric. What could be forgotten, or scrolled past, is now a large tangible object for curiosity. 

On view at Fiberart International 2025, Brewhouse Arts, Pittsburgh, PA