This Spring I was asked to lead Opening Ceremony for the Winston Salem Yoga Festival, at which point I called in prosperity from every direction for our downtown Winston Salem business community. Since then, our year has been pulled by this prayer work. This past weekend, The Hoop facilitated our first runway experience with Winston Salem Fashion Week’s 5th year. As we are celebrating our 25th year as a business, the numerology wasn’t lost on me.
Hoop member, and lead designer for Hanesbrands, Melissa Coleman asked me to collaborate with her on a line for this year, and I honestly cannot say I’ve ever worked on a smoother project before. For those in the industry, you can relate to how hectic this sort of handmade designer work can get, especially at a fashion week. But we were divinely guided in our process (more to that story in our FB live!). I had temporarily moved right down the street and we started to drop by each other’s homes to work on the pieces in our “down-time” as moms. We wrangled Maggie into helping us more than a few times. I wrangled my daughter and boyfriend into helping me more than a few times.
I literally sat in ceremonial wonder at the dining room table (apparently the altar of my art life since childhood) and created hundreds of pieces of jewelry for this show and the store. Months later, we expressed this collaborative and ceremonial work from the Hoop on the red carpet and the runway with a group of talented and professional women who modeled the lineage work with grace and respect, including our very own Maggie Draughn.
We’ve met so many new and amazing talented artists and individuals along this piece of the path Kindred has been taking this year. We hope that you’ll stop by and shop our off-the-runway collection, especially the clothing! Melissa created the outfits from reclaimed goodwill finds, altering every piece in someway before I hand-painted the pieces and embroidered our designs. We were able to collect quality photography and video-work around this project, so we hope you browse our FB and Instagram feeds, as well as the media portion of the website, where you can now shop the exclusive Fall Line 2019.
~ Antonina “Little Thunder” #hometownshaman