Natalie Chanin was standing on a corner in New York City‘s Garment District in the summer of 2000, frustrated that she couldn’t find anyone to help her sew a collection of T-shirts she’d intended to show the following year at Fashion Week. The designs were at once simple and complex, based on a T-shirt that Chanin had cut apart and sewn back together, by hand, using a specific stitch. On that day, on that corner, the then 38-year-old had an epiphany that would alter the course of her life: The elusive stitch was a quilting stitch, and the people who truly excelled at it lived in her hometown of Florence, perched on the Tennessee River in northwest Alabama. Spoiler alert: she moved back, and her life was drastically changed. Read the story here. Photo: Rinne Allen
