Dusty-Indigo, Sage-Green and Ginger-Red Mia Kelly
I go to the op shop with a friend one day, and we’re in the purple section of the shirts rifling through haltertops with sequins and a t-shirt printed with ‘this is an expression’ and this confusing silky ruffly thing that I don’t know how you’re supposed to wear, and my friend says that she reckons you can tell the story of a person’s life by their clothes. Then I think about how in the years after that one night when I was nine, or maybe ten, I wore nothing but baggy jumpers and loose long pants that I wouldn’t take off on forty degree days, and I stopped getting changed next to the dryer, and my Mum would get angry with me because can’t I just try to look normal? But I didn’t want to be looked at, at all. And then when I was older and I took up weaving Mum laughed and said who knew I’d end up wanting to make my own clothes when after all I never cared what I wore at the age most girls cared so much. And I didn’t know how to tell her that maybe I really had cared. I’ve never known how to tell that story. And then when I was at the haberdashery on Collie Street, picking out skeins of dusty-indigo alpaca blend and sage-green superwash wool and gingerred upcycled wool, I kept imagining how I was going to make something truly wonderful, something soft and technicolour and so light it floated like grassseeds in the wind – and I hoped I’d be brave enough to wear it.
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