Alabama Stitch Book: Projects and Stories Celebrating the Deep South

This is where Alabama Chanin begins. Part instruction, part story, this book traces how Natalie Chanin built a hand-sewn clothing practice rooted in the American South. What starts with repurposed cotton T-shirts becomes something more layered—an approach to making that centers handwork, repetition, and care. The techniques are accessible: hand stitching, reverse appliqué, simple construction methods that don’t rely on machines. But the framework around them is what holds weight. After years away, Chanin returned to Florence, Alabama and began working with local women—many of whom had previously worked in the region’s textile mills—to produce garments by hand. Projects throughout the book offer a starting point, but they’re not the end goal. The emphasis is on process: how fabric is handled, how stitches build over time, how a garment takes shape slowly. Rooted in one place, this is a regional approach to slow fashion—grounded in local labor, memory, and material. One way of working, within a much broader global tradition of hand sewing.