Sewing Shoes and More with Jaimie Black

Sign up for the Black Women Stitch quarterly newsletter!   Check out our  merch too! Leave a BACKSTITCH message and tell us about your favorite episode. Join the Black Women Stitch PatreonBlack Women Stitch 2023 Wall CalendarAmazon StoreJaimie BlackJaimie Black is a wife and mother that has fallen in love with DIY sewing, shoemaking, and the occasional bagmaking a few years ago. She has always had a passion for shoes and always believed that a beautiful shoe can always make an outfit. Her brand “Black Linings” has been a few years in the making. She produces specially crafted, limited-quantity designs and hopes to grow into more designs with time.Lisa WoolforkLisa Woolfork is an associate professor of English specializing in African American literature and culture. Her teaching and research explore Black women writers, Black identity, trauma theory, and American slavery. She is the founder of Black Women Stitch, the sewing group where Black lives matter. She is also the host/producer of Stitch Please, a weekly audio podcast that centers Black women, girls, and femmes in sewing. In the summer of 2017, she actively resisted the white supremacist marches in her community, Charlottesville Virginia. The city became a symbol of lethal resurging white supremacist violence. She remains active in a variety of university and community initiatives, including the Community Engaged Scholars program. She believes in the power of creative liberation.learnedHow growing up in Africa shaped Jaimie’s creative visionJaimie’s sewing storyThe relation between the art and utility of clothesLessons Jaimie learned sewing by hand, then transitioning to machineJaimie’s motivation to start sewingDetails about home shoe-makingInsights into Jaimie making her own clothesLessons she has learned since launchingInsights into Creations by JaimieQuotes from the show:“Even sewing is an art because everything artistic starts in the mind. What you decide to wear is an art” —Jaimie Black in “Stitch Please”“If you are dressed to the 9’s based on the options created by someone else, there’s always a bit of a limitation and always a big chance that what you like will be there” —Lisa Woolfork in “Stitch Please”“One of the things I have seen, is that all these movements ‘new movements for sustainability’ about visible mending, about let’s repair things, it’s the western world rediscovering practices that people in regions that are more committed to sustainability have been doing all along” —Lisa Woolfork in “Stitch Please”​​“Shoe-making became one of my big loves. I started shoe-making a few years ago, I was always an absolute lover of shoes (…) so the only way I could solve that was by making my own shoes, so that I could make as many as I wanted” —Jaimie Black in “Stitch Please”“I truly wanted to keep the art of shoe-making alive (…) as a first launch I might be a bit more open to changing a few things now as I grow slowly” —Jaimie Black in “Stitch Please”On lessons learned since launching her business: “One of the biggest things is that factories will never be on time” —Jaimie Black in “Stitch Please”Stay Connected:Lisa WoolforkInstagram: Lisa WoolforkTwitter: