Kim Kight

Dioramarama
The Excitement Machine‘

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For Christmas 2001, my mother-in-law surprised me with a sewing machine. I had only mentioned “I’d like to learn to sew” in passing, the same way you mention “Man I’d like to learn Dutch” or “Wouldn’t it be cool to play in a mariachi band?” Isn’t that incredible? Best gift ever.

After some beginner lessons from the local seamstress/chanteuse Leslie “Glitzkrieg” Bonnell, I was off and running. A powerful fabric lust developed. In fact there are times when I’ve considered myself more of a fabric aficionado than a sewist. I think that’s why I was drawn to quilting. Yes, it gives some semblance of reason and purpose to fabric hoarding, but it’s also about what the fabric becomes.

The bags and garments I’ve made have had pretty short shelf lives — sometimes I get sick of looking at a project before it’s even finished! It’s a gamble that can make me reluctant to cut in the first place. But with quilting, you take fabric along this process that I think honors it and enshrines it. From the design stages through to the finishing, it undergoes these amazing visual and textural changes, then in the end you have an object that will in all likelihood improve over time. I have always wondered how two layers of fabric with some batting in the middle got to be SO much more than that, so that must be my answer.

In the quilting arena, I am inspired by the women of Gee’s Bend, Denyse Schmidt, FunQuilts, and Kaffe Fasset. More generally I love: my husband’s drawings, Lucienne Day, “outsider” art, dioramas, old department store catalogs, commercial illustration/design — especially kid-oriented stuff — from the 60s through 80s, retro video games, old clip art, and crazy web experimentation like Superbad and Paperrad.

I also knit and embroider, but those things go in spurts. I really, really want to start screen printing. In high school I caught the last throes of old-school graphic arts, with letterpress, stat cameras, bakelite stamps, the works, and I dream about returning to that stuff.

My first weblog was The Excitement Machine, which began in 2001. Circa 2004, when the craft posts were getting excessive, I moved them over to Dioramarama. We got the domain name intending for it to actually be about dioramas, and maybe someday it will be. As recently as two years ago there were barely any sewing-centered craft blogs and I’m so excited that I’m finding new bookmarks every day.

Dioramarama begat the Modern Quilt Along and got me hooked up with Hillary of Wee Wonderfuls to co-start the Vintage Fabric group on Flickr.

I moved to Austin, TX for grad school in 1996 and never left. Through many detours I’m now a speech-language pathologist by day. I don’t deserve my excellent husband. We are hoping for children. We are dog people.