Natalie meets Robert and Jennifer Rauch in the fall of 2000. Robert becomes a decades-long collaborator with Project Alabama and Alabama Chanin, photographing collections and books, and designing graphics, posters, and catalogs. Natalie and Jennifer become lifelong friends and part-time colleagues.
The Makeshift Tote Project begins in 2013 through a workshop hosted at the Standard Hotel Penthouse. Guests are given a blank organic cotton tote bag to customize throughout the evening, using provided materials and sewing notions. The conversations that ensue offer inspiration, as guests process and connect the themes, topics, and other shared experiences from previous Makeshift events that year.
Natalie and Lisa Fox meet during a trunk show at Bergdorf Goodman in New York in 2000. They quickly realize that they eat lunch each day at Bar Pitti on Sixth Avenue—where Project Alabama makes the uniforms. After making plans to meet the next day for lunch, a lifelong friendship forms. From trunk shows and travels, to “Stitch and Bitch” gatherings and Makeshift dinners, the two collaborate often. Lisa’s business, gallery, and event space, LF8 becomes showroom, and home, for Natalie in New York.
For over two decades, Natalie works with collaborators to collect and archive oral histories from quilters and textile workers across the Southeast, in what is now Project Threadways. In 2006, Natalie realizes that these oral histories tell a patchwork story, much like the historic quilts from this region.Through the Textile Story Quilts project, a collection of threadbare, disused, and fraying quilts are lovingly restored. Stories from collected oral histories are embroidered over the repaired sections of the quilts.The Textile Story Quilts, historical artifacts, are displayed at galleries, museums, and stores around the world, preserving the art of quiltmaking and the stories of textile workers. Today, this collection of quilts are available for view at the Tennessee Valley Museum of Art in Tuscumbia, Alabama, and Don Purcell in Atlanta, Georgia.
In 2001, on a cold December Friday, Steven Smith shows up at the Project Alabama production office at Lovelace Crossroads.
In response to the growing Covid-19 pandemic, and the shortage of N95 face masks, Alabama Chanin pivots manufacturing to masks, designed in collaboration with local medical professionals and intended for reuse.
Natalie and Alabama Chanin are featured in The Women Who Revolutionized Fashion: 250 Years of Design, a publication that accompanies an exhibit created by the Peabody Essex Museum. Called Made It: The Women Who Revolutionized Fashion, the exhibit and book seek to provide greater recognition of women as makers of fashion.
In 2017, The Geometry of Hand-Sewing: A Romance in Stitches and Embroidery from Alabama Chanin and The School of Making publishes as a comprehensive guide to hand-stitching and embroidery. Sharing what Natalie has learned through experience and has taught to hundreds of artisans and workshop guests over the years, the book focuses on the stitches themselves rather than projects or garments. It examines over 100 embroidery stitches in seven grid structures, using different geometric systems to present a breakthrough method for learning and preserving embroidery stitches. To simplify learning, the book also includes two plastic stitching cards die-cut with the grids on which every stitch in the book is based. These reusable cards can be stitched through for practicing or used as stencils for transferring grids to fabric.
After seven years of collaborating on a dinnerware collection, Alabama Chanin and Heath Ceramics announce a jewelry line, producing hand-etched necklaces in the Alabama Chanin-Heath Ceramics collaborative style. The necklaces are cut in Heath’s San Francisco tile factory then completed in their Sausalito factory, where the jewelry team drills the holes in the bars, glazes, etches, fires, and assembles the necklaces. The bars are fired in the kiln with larger ceramics, filling in small areas of the kiln that would otherwise be empty, and thus making the production process more efficient. The highly skilled etching technique used in Alabama Chanin’s line of dinnerware is also applied to the necklaces.
Founded in 2019, Project Threadways utilizes Makeshift's conversations, Alabama Chanin's experience, and Natalie's vision through academic partnerships and programming. Project Threadways explores, studies, and records the history of textiles as material culture. The purpose is to understand the impact of textiles and their creation, from raw material to finished goods, on the local community, and then connect that to the region, the nation, and across the world. In a partnership with the Muscle Shoals National Heritage Area (MSNHA) and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, Project Threadways collects oral histories, analyzes and publishes data, and stages events that begin and advance conversations on the connections between people, places, and materials.
