WHO WE ARE
The Yard Sail project was founded August 2020 to address an historic social upheaval with practical support and to meet a global pandemic with the contents of our cellar. Our company is grounded in two principles. Everyone involved in design and production is fairly paid. All profits go to critically important causes. To arrive at our price we double our cost. At least half of every dollar spent at Yard Sail goes directly to a vital organization. All fabrics have been donated by the Tillett family.
A yard sale is the most ephemeral of stores. It's an open air market where the contents of an otherwise private life are offered for public sale. A yard sale is usually a painful personal dispossession made to carry someone’s life through hard times. Here at Yard Sail, our lives are not in jeopardy, but many of those around us face deprivations, and, in the case of transgender sex workers, daily mortal threats. We are putting up this yardsale in support of others. We've begun with face masks that utilize our stock of historic fabrics hand printed by the Tillett family. We’ll develop other products down the line.
Tillett Fabrics / d.d. and Leslie Tillett
D.D and Leslie Tillett designed and created custom, hand printed textiles in NYC from 1946 to 2008. Their decorative fabrics adorned the great houses of the period including the Kennedy White House. Their textiles and fashions were treasured by the cognoscenti, from presidents and titans of industry to Hollywood stars. During their lives d.d. and Leslie Tillett devoted much of their creative energies to progressive projects, one of the most significant being the co-founding, in 1968, of The Design Works of Bedford Stuyvesant, the first fully Black owned textile printing works in the United States. All DWBS designs were based in traditional African motifs and created by craftspeople and artists from the community with whom the Tilletts shared their techniques.
https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/exhibitions/2239
At Yard Sail we are acutely aware of the link between our family’s craft as it first developed in England and what all English textile industries owe to the limitless cotton imports made possible by centuries of slavery.
To learn more about the Tilletts in the 20th century:
Tillett exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, 2012
A visual diary of the exhibition
Design Works of Bedford Stuyvesant, 1968.
Tillett and Rauscher Inc.
Seth Tillett and Nicole Rauscher are artists and designers in a number of disciplines. T&R Inc. is an umbrella company covering a range of their enterprises. Together they have designed and created hand printed textiles, examples of which are in the collection of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Yard Sail is their latest project.
To learn more: