I've been attending QuiltCon Together, so I didn't get a chance to blog over the weekend. One of the best lecture/talks that I was able to watch was Sarah Trail, the founder of the Social Justice Sewing Academy. I was blown away by her presentation (again) and was happy to see the great response she got from the QuiltCon attendees. That's why I was so glad to be able to snag one of these Aurifil thread boxes with such a very clever name.
It's a great selection of ten spools of skin tone threads to use when working on embroidering one of the blocks from SJSA or whenever you need to represent colors of people that come in some other shade than that peachy pink "flesh tone".
This is one of those things I hadn't ever consciously taken notice of as an oblivious white person, that we use "flesh tone" or "nude" as a term for the default without specifying it equals the color of the skin of a white person. In normal usage flesh tone means someone pretty close to the color of my own skin. But of course there's a whole beautiful range of shades of people out there that are not the color that "flesh tone" means.
This affects so many things that we use every day (not just thread) like bandaids
And other medical related products like bandage wrap
And even ballet shoes
Now all three of these things that we buys and use are meant to blend in or disappear on a person, the less contrast the better between the thing and the person's skin. It's great to see that there are now alternatives being sold that will work for more people. Maybe we need to come up with a new word for the color that most white people are, very few of us are in fact even close to white, so it's really not useful when describing colors. This is of course, a huge topic which I'm not going to go into here, but it's something to think about, read about, etc.
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