Oh, Ramona…Ramona, Ramona, Ramona. How much do you love that name? I met the whip-smart Yale grad and old-school, homeschoolin’ mom at Long Beach with the aforementioned LAMQG posse and loved her right away. She is an awesome force. Firstly, if she could be a prairie woman or raise her kids in the woods with no media (but still electricity for her many sewing machines…and Instagram) and just bows & arrows, and fur pelts, and crayons wittled from branches–filled with hand-dyed wax, she would. I, and most of the hippie-bourgeoisie mamas I know, would also like to do that and parent like that, but few of us would exchange our organic carrot ginger juice, Downton Abbey, and Nordstom for the chance. I do believe Ramona would.
She quilts with the gusto, speed, and energy that I consume….hmmmm… Chocolate? She MUST sew all night. She must sew while her kids are patiently sitting at her feet reading volumes of poetry and stories of yore. Quilts just fall off of her. What might take her a few hours would certainly take me months. She is crazy prolific.
Read more about Ramona’s Cathedral Window quilt here |
I should add that Ramona’s intelligence comes out in her modern quilts. Check out her award-winning Cathedral Window. It is a conceptual piece and very interesting besides being so beautiful–like a bitmapped, pixelated version of something traditional. It emits light not like a Cathedral Window (as the name of this traditional pattern suggests), but more like an old Lite-Brite or maybe Tetris? And when you see it in person you find that is weeping, hairy, and shaggy. She left the threads uncut so there are thousands of tiny hairs coming off of this thing. It is deconstructionism. It is a relic of the old and new–very wabi sabi and very cool.
Anyway, amidst her busy life of newborns and kids, she agreed to whip up somethin’ in COLLAGE. She used the new Roller Skate dress pattern from fab Oliver + S here. And she made up these super-cool boy shorts. LOVE!
Garments by Ramona Burke. Photography by Jill McNamara. |
Go to her blog here and leave a comment to win a stack of COLLAGE fabric to play with!
Carrie, Ramona did a great job on the dress and shorts. I especially love the purple dot fabric from your collection.
I am really crushing on this range – it is so nice and sooooo different. Hope I win some as I don’t want to wait until it is released to start to play with it… 🙂