An incomplete timeline of the life of this collection in reverse chronological order.
April 2025 With Pause World, hosted ‘Skirt Party: A gathering to celebrate 632 woollen skirts’ at a loft in SoHo.
March 2025 The project was featured on Vogue.com. Link to the full article here.
February 2025 Presented the collection at the 4th annual Artefacta conference at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Among other things, I shared a running list of ideas for what to do with the skirts, above.
January 2025 Hosted collection visit for the Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York. Find the announcement here.
November 2024 Presented the collection to students in Parsons’ History of Design and Curatorial Studies program. View the full PowerPoint presentation here.
September 2024 Presented ‘600+ Wool Skirts: Collection Preview and Conversation’ with fashion archivist Sarah C. Byrd and my mom, Carol Colburn, as part of New York Textile Month. Link to the full presentation here.
May 2024 Unpacking wool skirts in my weaving studio in Brooklyn, New York.
May 2024 Departing Duluth, Minnesota for Brooklyn, New York with a van-ful of wool skirts.
April 2024 The key we used to describe each skirt.
April 2024 Worked with my mom to label and describe each skirt in the collection.
April 2024 Worked with my dad to photograph each skirt in the collection.
April 2024 Airing out the entire collection on my parents’ clothesline in Duluth, Minnesota.
July 2023 We took two boxes of skirts and laid them out on the driveway to decide what to do next.
February 2023 A square foot rag rug study woven to estimate the amount of rag rug that could be woven from wool skirts in the collection. This piece was featured in ‘Threading the Needle: Weaving Traditions into Contemporary Textile Art’ exhibition at Cornell University’s Mann Library Gallery. View a short video introduction here.
2012 Some of the skirts in my grandma’s basement before they were moved to my parents’ garage.
2012 My aunt and my mom worked together to sort the skirts by color into boxes before my grandma moved from her house into an apartment.
1995 My mom incorporated a number of wool skirts from the collection into her costume designs for a University of Northern Iowa Theatre Department production of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.
August 1987 Great-grandma Laura, my mom Carol holding me, and Grandma Audrey, who collected the skirts.
July 2023 My dad’s Highway 1 rag rug, woven with fabric from the wool skirts, still in use in the front hall of my parent’s house.
1981 My dad’s sketches for his Highway 1 rag rug.
1992 The house where my grandma lived from 1976 to 2011. My grandpa built dedicated shelving in the basement for her wool skirt collection.
July 2023 My mom’s 1973 rag rug still in use in my parent’s house. My grandma helped disassemble several skirts and cut them into strips that my mom used to weave with.
1973 My mom’s sketch for a rag rug to be woven with fabric from wool skirts for a weaving class taught by Anna Smits at the University of Minnesota.
1930s Audrey with her accordion.
1920s A photo from my Grandma Audrey’s family albums depicting the day the rag man came to collect household rags on her street in South Minneapolis.