Katharine McCormick: The Boa

It’s Deb again, back with more about our project for the exhibition Deeds Not Words: Celebrating 100 Years of Women’s Suffrage. One of the reasons I love the particular photo of Katharine McCormick we used is because she’s wearing a boa. In my personal statements, I always end with this: “I’m waiting for feather boas and shiny costume jewelry to make a comeback and think there would be less road rage, if people had more interesting cars (think fins, chrome, bright colors).” Ironically, one of the reasons it took us so long to finally work on the project was because McCormick is wearing a boa in the photo, and we weren’t quite sure how to capture its, er, boa-ness!

 

The Boa Concept

Years ago, some of us in the Gold Country Chapter of the American Sewing Guild in Placerville, CA made boas out of fabric scraps and ribbon. These gals were named the Boa Constructors. Most were really elegant; I chose to work with denim, given my rural lifestyle. Tee hee.

 

 

When Kris and I were looking at the known photos of McCormick and saw the one with the boa, we knew we just had to use that one. Once we realized we could make the piece three-dimensional, we remembered the method the “boa constructors” had used so many years ago to construct their boas. Of course, in our version we would put text on our strips of fabric.

 

The Process

First we cut out a bunch of text from magazines and newspapers and scanned them into the computer. We made sure we had space between two sets of phrases for the knots we would have to tie to the support twine. Then with the help of Photoshop, we worked our magic on the scan, sometimes adding a solid color background.

 

 

Then we printed the words onto fabric. We decided to print some on cotton percale and others on silk organza.

 

 

 

Whenever we print out the fabric, we have to steam and rinse it. You can see that some of the dye washes out of the fabric. To prevent the dye from staining the white fabric, we use a fixative made by Jacquard. We’ve been happy Jacquard customers for all of our 15 years as Pixeladies.*

 

 

Then we wash the fabric in the washing machine with Shout Color Catchers (just in case). As you can see below, the catcher did catch some errant dye. For the boa, once the fabric was dry, we started we started cutting, and cutting, and cutting.

 

The Tying (& Tying & Tying)

It takes a lot of strips to make a boa. We must have printed four or five yards of fabric for the strips. We added a few strips of black and white ribbon that we had in our stash and headed outside to start tying.

 

 

 

After the first couple of hours, we had a small section. I don’t know why Kris was smiling in this photo. [Kris writes: because we probably went and bought ice cream as a reward for tying a few inches of boa.]

 

 

We kept on tying, and tying, and tying. Finally we had enough to wrap around Kris.

 

 

Would it be enough for McCormick? Stay tuned!

* As of December 2018, we decided to stop printing our own fabric. Click here, if you want to know more about that.