Bolt Fabric + Home

04/01/2026

03/03/2026

02/14/2026

01/24/2026

𝙁𝙖𝙞𝙩𝙝 𝙍𝙞𝙣𝙜𝙜𝙤𝙡𝙙, 𝙌𝙪𝙞𝙡𝙩 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙑𝙞𝙨𝙪𝙖𝙡 𝘼𝙧𝙩𝙞𝙨𝙩, 𝘿𝙞𝙚𝙨 𝙖𝙩 𝟵𝟯
Faith Ringgold, the pioneering African American artist known for her vibrant story quilts, passed away at the age of 93 , at her home in Englewood, New Jersey. Born in Harlem, New York, in 1930, she grew up in a creative household where her mother taught her sewing and quilting—skills that would later define her signature artistic style. As a child, she struggled with asthma, which kept her indoors and fueled her imagination and creativity.
Ringgold began her career with traditional painting, but in the 1960s, she faced challenges gaining recognition in galleries that often overlooked African American artists. Her early works depicted daily life in Harlem and explored the social and political tensions of the era, most notably in her series “The American People”.
Her international fame came with the creation of “Story Quilts”, textile artworks that combine fabric, painting, and narrative text to tell stories about African American life, identity, history, and the empowerment of women. Among her most famous works are “Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima?”, which reimagined the stereotypical figure to challenge racial clichés, and “Tar Beach”, a story about a young girl dreaming of flying over the city, symbolizing freedom and aspiration.
Despite the barriers she faced as a Black woman in the art world, Ringgold continued to create and advocate through her art, leaving a profound impact on generations of African American and female artists. Her work is held in prestigious collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, ensuring her legacy endures as both a cultural and artistic beacon.
“Every piece of fabric tells a story… and every story can change the world.”

12/24/2025

Gee’s Bend quilts are what inspired me to take up quilting.

12/16/2025

"This strange square is undoubtedly the most extraordinary work of literature in human history. Yet, unfortunately, barely anyone in the West has ever heard of it. There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.

"At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.

"Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.

"Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.

"The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.

"At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.

"Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:
仁智懷德聖虞唐，
貞志篤終誓穹蒼，
欽所感想妄淫荒，
心憂增慕懷慘傷。

In pinyin, it is:
Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,
zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,
qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,
xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.

"Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng

"The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."

"Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:
傷慘懷慕增憂心，
荒淫妄想感所欽，
蒼穹誓終篤志貞，
唐虞聖德懷智仁。

The pinyin:
Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,
huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,
cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,
táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.

"It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén

"And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."

"That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!

"At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:
詩圖璇玑，始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."

Or reversed:
蘇氏詩圖，璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."

"Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle. For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (http://kangshiw.com/contents/461/2635.html), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.

"Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%87%E9%94%A6%E5%9B%9E%E6%96%87%E8%AE%B0/22727125).

"Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:

"The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.

"Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.

"It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions

"Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.

"So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:
- A love letter (expressing personal longing)
- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)
- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)
- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)
- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision

"And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".

"Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.

"The heart at the center was filled after all."

https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1999315488598622360/photo/1

11/29/2025

Social Justice Sewing Academy in the East Bay continues the legacy of her activism.

She was told her art belonged in living rooms, not galleries. So she stitched a revolution instead.
Faith Ringgold was a Black woman with a paintbrush in 1960s America.
That alone made her dangerous.
Galleries hung the same names over and over. White men. The occasional white woman. The walls told a story about who mattered in America—and Faith Ringgold wasn't in it.
She painted what others refused to show: police violence, burning cities, racial rage, Black joy. Her 1967 painting "Die" stretched twelve feet across a canvas—a riot of blood, bodies, Black and white figures attacking each other with knives. It was the Civil Rights era captured in brutal, unflinching color.
This wasn't abstract expressionism. This wasn't color fields or minimalism. This was America's violence laid bare.
And the art world hated it.
"Too political," they said. "Too angry." Galleries rejected her. Museums turned her away. Her paintings made collectors uncomfortable, so they didn't buy them.
This wasn't ancient history. This was 1968—the year Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, the year Robert Kennedy was shot, the year cities burned with grief and fury. In modern America, the art world was more interested in preserving white comfort than documenting Black truth.
But Faith Ringgold didn't wait for permission.
In 1968, the Whitney Museum of American Art opened an exhibition: "The 1930s: Painting and Sculpture in America." A comprehensive survey of American art from that decade.
Not a single Black artist was included.
Not Jacob Lawrence, whose work was in the Whitney's own collection. Not Archibald Motley. Not Romare Bearden. No one.
Faith Ringgold stood outside the Whitney with dozens of other Black artists and protested. They demanded recognition. They demanded equity. They demanded that American museums stop erasing Black artists from American history.
The museum barely blinked.
Two years later, Faith was back outside the Whitney—this time protesting for women. She co-founded the Ad Hoc Women Artists' Committee and protested every Sunday for four months. She brought boiled eggs painted black with "50%" written on them—the percentage of women who should be in museum exhibitions.
They brought police whistles and disrupted gallery openings. They issued fake press releases announcing the museum had agreed to their demands, forcing the Whitney to publicly deny it.
Faith Ringgold was done asking nicely.
But protest has limits when the frame itself is too small.
So Faith broke the frame.
In 1972, she visited a museum in Amsterdam and saw Tibetan thangkas—paintings on fabric that told stories. She thought about her mother, Willi Posey, a dressmaker in Harlem. She thought about her great-great-grandmother Susie Shannon, born into slavery, who spent her life quilting for plantation owners.
And Faith realized: quilting was storytelling. It was art. It was archive. It was a tradition passed through generations of Black women whose stories had been dismissed, overlooked, erased.
If museums wouldn't give her a platform, she would create her own.
In 1980, Faith and her mother made their first quilt together: "Echoes of Harlem." It was their final collaboration. Willi died a year later.
Faith kept quilting.
In 1983, she created her first story quilt: "Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima?" She took the racist pancake box stereotype—the fat, smiling Black mammy—and transformed her into a successful businesswoman. She reclaimed what had been used to demean Black women and turned it into power.
Critics called her work "domestic." "Craft," not art. "Women's work."
Faith called it revolutionary.
Each quilt became a living narrative. She painted on canvas, surrounded it with fabric borders, and wrote stories directly onto the textile. Family histories. Dreams. Freedom flights. The voices of Black women who had been seen but never heard. Remembered as bodies but not as people.
In 1988, she created "Tar Beach."
The quilt showed a family gathered on a Harlem rooftop on a sweltering summer night. "Tar Beach"—that's what they called the tarred rooftops where families escaped the heat of apartments without air conditioning. A place to breathe. A place to dream.
In the center of Faith's quilt, an eight-year-old Black girl named Cassie Louise Lightfoot floats above the city. She's flying over the George Washington Bridge, claiming it as her own. In the story Faith wrote onto the fabric, Cassie says her father can't join the union because he's Black. So she flies over the Union Building and claims it for him. She tells her brother: "Anyone can fly."
It was a declaration disguised as a bedtime story. A revolutionary act wrapped in folk art. A Black girl defying gravity and racism in the same breath.
In 1991, Faith turned "Tar Beach" into a children's book. It won the Caldecott Honor and the Coretta Scott King Award. It became a classic, read in schools across America.
The same museums that had rejected Faith's paintings suddenly wanted her quilts.
The Whitney Museum—the institution she had protested for years—eventually acquired her work. In 2014, they purchased "Hate Is a Sin Flag," a piece where Faith documented the exact moment in 1968 when a white man called her the n-word while she protested outside their doors.
The museum that had silenced her now displayed her testimony of their discrimination.
The Museum of Modern Art acquired "Die" in 2016 and hung it across from Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon." Faith Ringgold's vision of American violence finally got the recognition it deserved—fifty years late.
By the 2020s, major retrospectives of her work traveled the world. The Guggenheim. The New Museum. Museums in London, San Francisco, Chicago. Art institutions scrambled to add her quilts to their permanent collections.
"I am fully aware of the attention I am now getting in the art world, and grateful," Faith told the New York Times in 2019. "But I am also aware that it has taken a very long time."
She was 89 years old. She'd been making art for over sixty years.
On April 13, 2024, Faith Ringgold died at her home in New Jersey at age 93.
She left behind over 17 children's books. Over 75 awards. 23 honorary doctorates. Museums filled with her quilts. Schools where children learn her name. Generations of Black artists who found space because she fought for it.
But more than that, she left proof that art doesn't have to choose between beauty and resistance. That quilts can be as powerful as oil paintings. That Black women's stories aren't fragments of American history—they are the fabric of it.
Faith Ringgold never separated art from truth. She painted police violence in the 1960s when galleries called it "too political." She quilted Black joy in the 1980s when critics dismissed it as "craft." She protested outside museums in the 1970s and hung inside them by the 2000s.
She proved that creativity could be activism. That stories told with needle and thread could be as radical as stories told with picket signs. That one Black woman refusing to wait for permission could change what counts as art.
Her quilts don't just hang on museum walls. They speak.
And what they say is this: You can't erase us. You can't silence us. You can't reduce us to stereotypes or statistics or margins of history.
We are the story. We always have been.
Faith Ringgold stitched that truth into every quilt she made—and the world finally listened.

11/22/2025

In the spring of 1933, Muddy Branch Hollow sagged under a rain that never seemed to quit. Clothes wouldn’t dry, roofs leaked like sieves, and the creek spilled over its banks until the road vanished beneath brown water. Families patched their cabins with feed sacks and coal tar, but the storm kept chewing at the edges of the hollow.

One morning, as thunder rolled like empty coal cars, fourteen-year-old Ora Mae Jarrell stitched scraps of old shirts together on her porch. Reds faded to rust, blues washed to gray, denim frayed like tired rope. She wasn’t sewing for beauty—just trying to keep her hands busy so she wouldn’t cry.

Her little brother asked what she was making.

“Haven’t decided,” she said. “But it oughta mean something.”

By the end of the day, she had sewn a patchwork square big enough to cover her porch window. Neighbors passing by stopped to look at it—bright scraps glowing even under the weeping sky.

The next day, a woman brought an old flour sack dyed with berries. Another brought a strip of her husband’s worn-out overalls. Someone offered a piece of a baby blanket that had survived three generations.

Day after day, families added pieces—stitched by hand, knotted with twine, patched with hope. Soon the square became a banner, then a sheet, then something larger than anyone expected.

They called it The Patchwork Flag.

When the rain rose high enough to swallow porches, the men of the hollow strung the flag between two chestnut posts on the dry ridge above town. It flapped wildly in the wind, a riot of colors against a world washed dull.

To the people of Muddy Branch, the flag meant more than cloth. It meant:
We are still here. We are many pieces, but we are one thing.

When government relief men rode in weeks later, searching for which hollows were still reachable, they spotted the flag long before they saw the cabins. The storm had taken the road, the bridge, and half the gardens—but it hadn’t taken the hollow.

And when the relief wagons finally rolled into Muddy Branch, people swore the flag was still waving, even though the wind had gone still.

Ora Mae kept a square from that flag all her life.

Because sometimes, the smallest scraps hold the biggest stories.

11/22/2025

Judi Brooks donated a dinosaur quilt to be raffled off to benefit La Familia Sana of Cloverdale. The winner is Suzanne Loofbourrow of Healdsburg.
We appreciate all of the money donated to LFS with the raffle and other fundraising through our store and its community.

11/18/2025

A nonprofit center for inspiration, education, and community in the graphic arts.

11/16/2025

Road trip!

11/16/2025

Betty Ford Smith, a teacher-turned-quilter, is renowned for preserving the traditional “Pine Cone” quilt pattern. She learned this intricate hand-stitched technique from a 92-year-old African American woman named Miss Sue (Arlene Dennis), whose story—along with her own—she documented in the book “Miss Sue and the Pine Cone Quilt.” She also authored “Pinecone Quilts: Keeping Tradition Alive – Learn to Make Your Own Heirloom.” Betty’s quilts have been exhibited in major national museums, including the Smithsonian. The “Pine Cone,” also known as the “Pine Burr,” is created by sewing folded fabric triangles side by side on a base in concentric circles, forming a rich, textured surface.