Sapphic Design
On grandma blogs, bleach, proto- and post- bonnetcore
Sewing circle and feminist terrorist society
The Sun Sets for Sunbonnet Sue is a gleefully macabre community quilt constructed by the members of the Seamsters Union Local 500 of Lawrence, Kansas in 1979. Each quilter chose a mode of execution for her block. Sunbonnet Sue, the modest, saccharine denizen of traditional quilts, self-immolates, overdoses, is eaten by sharks. She’s smashed by space junk emblazoned with a US flag, poisoned by nuclear waste, strangled by a giant daisy while picking flowers in the woods.
I wanna be in the room with the Seamsters as they assembled this masterpiece of American folk art. The cartoon violence transmits a delightful vulgarity, a winking militancy found in comix like Hothead Paisan and the Tits & Clits roster. I imagine the quilters blasting Leslie Gore, sipping mugs of tea and cans of Miller Lite, cackling at the increasingly eccentric death scenarios, the scent of armpit and essential oils in the air. This quilt is giving feminist auntie, and I want to meet her spiritual nieces.
The Seamsters Union collaborated on another opus. The Douglas County Bank Quilt reveals one more clever subversion of a traditional quilt motif. The piece was inspired by developers’ destruction of historical properties one night in 1987. Patchwork houses are split into pieces across a blue-grey ground. A bulldozer cleaves the bottom edge. The trim is stenciled “June 27, 1987: The Most Destructive Single Day in Lawrence since Quanttrill’s Raid.”
One Niece: Helene Hulak
Twenty first century schizoid man with a large dash of drag. Eden’s Eve via Junji
Ito. Silk with heavy stitching, embroidered arteries.
Bleach as a feminist methodology
Punks paint with bleach, stripping pigments, exposing garish undergirdings. Colors mold and rust. A chemical spill shimmers, a rainbow of corrosion. Decay is a color. Silence is a rhythm too.
Lynda Benglis slops polyurethane shaped like naked ladies on the floor. Oil and water foul the mop. We make messes and we clean them up. Girls own the void.
Grandma Blogs
In grad school I spent a lot of time in the Grandma Craft blogosphere, learning how to gather and stitch fabric to make bunting, how to put binding on a quilt. It was an uneasy but necessary alignment. In these digital spaces, users of a certain age (and race and gender) revisit traditional forms without critique, earnestly transmitting instructions for their recreation. They assist each other in making patriotic bunting to hang from suburban porches for Fourth of July. They make Quilts for Cops. And without them I wouldn’t know how to sew a bonnet.
Bonnet Culture
For my Art & Feminisms seminar in grad school I made a self portrait as broom cover: A soft sculpture based on a actual pattern (Sew Special brand) – a bonneted girl, face modestly hidden, smuggling a duck under her arm, clad in a “rustic style of a bygone era.” Rustic in a nebulous way, like a wagon wheel chandelier or a stick of rock candy from the Cracker Barrel gift shop. My cohort grilled me – why am I making this crunchy Americana shit –bunting, spoon rests, broom covers– if I am a “minimalist sculptor” ? I scream: “You can’t deal with my infinite nature, can you?”
My professor volunteered that she learned how to sew on a Holly Hobbie sewing machine.
Rustic, bygone style is marketed to girls. In middle school, soccer moms hocked us bonnets for Pioneer Day festivities. We spent a Friday dipping candles, and consorting with baby animals -–goats trucked in from a local farm. I was bonnet poisoned by Little House on the Prairie (where they memorably made party balloons out of pig bladders) and the 18th century living museum we’d visit on field trips. Years later when internet artist Molly Soda minted Bonnetcore I felt a charge of recognition.
In I Heart Huckabees, When Naomi Watts’ character decides to abandon the materialist trappings of her supermodel life and embrace existentialism, she starts wearing a bonnet. What happens in the woods at night ? Nothing ! Everything !
I revisited these milk maid vibes years later working at the coffee shop, literally hefting jugs of 2% to and from the walk in, my breasts tumbling out of my scoop neck dress. A punk pastoral with rotten puddles, a disgruntled employee drunk on the clock, smoking cigs and talking shit.
Sources:
Marybeth Stalp. “In the Shadow of the Quilt: Political Messaging in Quilts.” The Quilt Index, Michigan State University Quilt Museum. 2011. https://quiltindex.org/view/?type=essays&kid=12-91-542
Accessed February 14, 2025.
Material Culture: Quilt Historian Barbara Brackman’s Blog About Quilts and Fabric Past and Present. http://barbarabrackman.blogspot.com/2010/02/douglas-county-bank-quilt.html
Accessed February 13, 2025.
http://debrowden.blogspot.com/2011/03/sue-makes-appearance.html
Jennifer Sullivan website : https://www.jennifersullivan.org/tshirts-1
Accessed February 14, 2025.
Sax Romer. Lesbian Potentiality and Feminist Media in the 1970s. Durham: Duke University Press, 2022.
I Heart Huckabees, directed by David O Russell (Searchlight Pictures, 2004).