Last Monday morning, Tajah texted me a photo of yards of 100% silk charmeuse she’d had stored away: “Maybe we can dye together?.. Looking for some new life for these.”

For the past year and a half, we’d been trying to organize ourselves into another collaboration between our respective projects, A.M.S. + Out of Seam/OO, merging seamlessly with our first collection of silks (2022). We set dates, applied to joint residencies, but timing hadn’t quite aligned in ways we would have needed to flow freely. Within the ease of our friendship, both of us always seem to find one another at the same pace — trusting it was meant that way — and last week, our time finally fit.

Some hours later, we were making paints in the backyard of my month-long sublet in Bed-Stuy — not far from where Tajah grew up — combining resources between our own collections of natural and mineral pigments;