Today we’d like to introduce you to Liberty Worth.
Liberty, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I grew up in a creative family – my dad is an artist and toy designer, so I was always around creativity and whimsy and watching my dad as a product designer created in me a desire to make things. After graduating with an Art and Public Relations major from Pepperdine University, I threw myself into a career as a textile designer for a large manufacturer in the interior design industry. I loved developing new product lines more than anything else, but also greatly enjoyed working with customers and interpreting their concepts and needs into new designs.
During the days, I did this corporate high-tech design job, but at night, I began itching for low tech, non-computerized outlets for my creativity. I tried embroidery, painting, mixed media and jewelry making. I was born in LA, but was living in Chicago for a few years and found that it was really fun to make and sell handmade items on the weekends at art festivals and in boutiques. I took night classes at the Art Institute of Chicago and fell in love with mixed media. I opened an Etsy shop when Etsy was a brand new little thing. Then I traded some of my handmade jewelry (which was my main item I created for a long time) with a customer of mine for some sewing lessons and I was hooked. She helped me to recreate a really cool vintage wrap skirt I had and loved and Libby Dibby Skirts was born. Over the next eight years, while also having two babies and fostering four more, I sold over 1300 handmade skirts. I made the first 60 myself and then decided I needed help. I began to employ other young moms who worked from home and we had a tiny little enterprise going. I was also continuing to do my mixed media on the side, and wondering how they sewing and mixed media might ever connect, but I couldn’t figure it out.
Eventually, we moved back to Los Angeles and I was in a neighborhood group where another mother asked if anyone had ever wanted to try quilting. I had always wanted to try and make one but was a little turned off by the traditional “ducks and bunnies” type quilts I had always seen. The home I had grown up in was very modern and my sensibilities were for modern design with a world traveler influence.
This group of young moms started meeting for a monthly get together – mostly we drank wine, compared notes on how hard it was to make a certain quilt block style and then pick a new free design online for the next month. Then one woman found out about a new organization starting in LA called the Modern Quilt Guild. I went to one meeting and I was hooked. Here were people like me, young urban, tattooed designers and costumers making modern art from fabric. They drew enormous inspiration from The Quilters of Gees Bend and the energy in the meetings was electric. I had never made a full quilt before my first meeting and by the 2nd time I went, I had finished 3. I was totally captured. There was an art form that combined my love of textiles with sewing and improvisational art.
I’ve now been quilting over ten years. I’ve made hundreds of quilts. My best guess is that I have made between 250-300. It took many years and many classes with teachers, videos on YouTube, tutorials, and hours with my new quilt friends to learn the techniques of quilting. It is a very precise art. Quilters are notorious for policing what a good and bad quilt is. There’s a lot of pressure and judgment on each piece, but at the same time, I found a community of new friends that was both in real life and online and I began to find favorite ways of quilting as I tried all different styles.
Eventually, I began to be asked if I would write quilt patterns for some of the fabric companies, or sell the quilts I made. One of my customers asked me to make a quilt from the clothing of a deceased loved one and I found another new passion and way to help people. About a year ago, I began a series of art quilts that spun me off in a whole new space… I call them my Noisy Flowers series (#noisyflowersquilt) – and in June of 2019, a 5’x10′ interactive Noisy Flowers quilt was installed in the Cayton Children’s Museum in Santa Monica, LA’s newest museum. That one was a fun collaboration that I did with Heath Interactive of Culver City and Voila Creative Studio.
My creative time is now divided between custom quilts and installation art, teaching sewing and also leading mixed media workshops which work on the healing aspects of collage. I work out of an adorable studio space in Mid City.
Has it been a smooth road?
It’s been a long journey. I started all of this as a young mother. I had two kids 18mo apart and when the youngest was three years old, we began also being a foster family. That inserted a lot of struggle and much grief into our hearts. It’s already hard to be a mother of littles – and I found that I had to fight for my creative soul and time – I stayed up really late at night, drank a lot of caffeine and gave up things like sleep and watching tv so that I could have time to create. Children are never finished. There’s always more. (The oldest are teenagers now, so I feel this acutely) – but the reality is that there was definitely some joy in being able to create from start to finish and to find projects that had a definite ending point. Creating is very therapeutic.
Add into this the additional heart issues of loving foster children like your own and then having to release them at the whims of a broken system, and I was walking around with some PTSD and serious grief. I channeled this into my art. I got called in to teach my mixed media workshops to grief groups. My struggles in fighting for time and pushing through grief and sadness to find my voice as an artist led me to start doing bereavement and memory quilts. It was the personal journey that led me to the professional one.
I now have three children. We are not fostering these days, but I still do a lot of volunteer work teaching sewing and working with at-risk teens or teen moms in shelters. I find a great deal of joy in sharing what has helped heal my broken heart and dreams with others.
Another funny struggle was that when I had so little time to make things with so much going on in the house, I gave up painting and began using cut paper and glue sticks to create quick easy collages whenever I could. I used to have a goal of making art for five minutes a day. This led me into a whole new side of my collage art and also has created in me a habit of choosing creativity whenever possible.
We’d love to hear more about your work and what you are currently focused on. What else should we know?
If I try to define myself succinctly, I say I make Fine Art and Modern Quilts. But a little more specifically, my mission is to create and teach art that expresses love and joy and healing to the world. I do this through my quilts, my workshops, my lessons, and my art installations.
I am most proud of the installation that is at the Cayton Children’s Museum – which opened in Santa Monica in June 2019. This piece is so cool It’s not only a 5’x10′ quilt, but it is interactive – it responds to touch with light and music (that part was the contribution and concept created by Jason Heath of Heath Interactive who brought me in on the project after seeing my art in a local show).
I think what sets me apart from others as an artist are my roots in design. I absolutely love collaborations and working with people to get them what they want. Like any original artist, I don’t want to copy other people’s work or recreate what they’ve seen elsewhere – and I am at the point in my career where I have created enough work that I have a huge base to work from – but I love getting the customer’s opinions and thoughts and inspirations to begin with as a framework – and then they let me loose to interpret those ideas. I am both a collaborative and individual artist and I love the solitude of working alone, though I enjoy the process of working with others.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
This is a funny question. I can say that modern quilting, thanks to the MQG has definitely gotten a foothold in a new generation of quilters, but I don’t know a ton of them who make their work to sell. Custom quilts are a very niche part of the handmade item industry.
What I do see growing though is this concept that I developed with Heath Interactive. When we created a durable, reproducible (even replaceable) interactive quilt that was made to respond to people in a high tech capacity but which also carries with it the soft hand of fabric and the beauty of slow stitched work, it was like discovering a new category of art installations. Interactive art installations – especially ones that respond with sensitivity and harmonics to children and those with high sensitivities can really be a part of healing environments that nurture those they serve. I am really excited about this opportunity and invention.
Pricing:
- My custom quilts start from $250 depending on size and complexity
Contact Info:
- Website: www.libertyworthart.com
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: @libbydibby
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/libertyworth
Image Credit:
Headshot image by Rob Flate, Gallery show image by Silvia Gallini
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