Category Archives: stitch journal

This started with the desire to create something artistic rather than copying someone else’s sampler.

Once I started to research dragonflies, I realized how much I identified with them.

Here are the images that influenced my initial design:

Creative Process in Photos

“Sew your Eyes Shut: Stitch your Mind Open” (I chose a crappy title for it. It seemed to make sense at the time.)

I learned to embroider as a young child. My mother cross stitched, and we wanted to create with her. She transferred images with her iron onto ragged white squares. We stretched these onto hoops and proceeded to stab out the outlines of ducks and flowers. I enjoyed creating, but I found my lack of skill and the limitations of following a pattern frustrating. I was happy to return to the therapeutic process of stabbing as an adult, especially given the opportunity to design my own pattern that communicated my own ideas.

The dragonfly gets a bad rap in western culture. She is called the devil’s darning needle. However, I chose to use a dragonfly as a visual metaphor for my self concept because I identify with both her strength and vulnerability. She is an agile flier and an adept predator. Her strong legs literally snatch her prey from the air; she can consume her own weight in half an hour. She migrates long distances, sometimes across an ocean. In spite of her strengths, the dragonfly is still very fragile and quite beautiful. She spends a large part of her life span in a larval state, feeding and growing, until she undergoes a transformation and erupts from her old skin in a new shape. Her adult life is short, but her ephemeral nature adds to her preciousness since it is so fleeting.

I have confidence that, like the dragonfly, I can achieve great ambitions. My journeys have been long and challenging, resulting in personal transformation. I often feel vulnerable and of passing significance, but I can see that my contributions are beautiful and influential in the moment.

I embroidered a dragonfly at rest in order to illustrate her strength and fragility. I stitched it into two swathes from the skirt of an old party dress in an organic process; I twined coloured strands and merged them on the background, and built texture with layers and layers of stitches. I feel inspired by layered colour; the multivalent effect portrays the layers of my personality.

The upcycled fabric speaks both to the brief nature of the dragonfly’s life and to my own impermanence. It also shows the value that can be found anywhere including in oneself.

I adorned the frame with evergreen twigs to juxtapose the artificial quality of my personal portrayal with the tangible reality of real branches. What I have framed is a construct–a two-dimensional depiction of a complex and changing entity with flawed vision. However, there is a resonance between the embroidered branches and the real ones that exemplifies that art is mimetic and communicates some truth.

I was influenced by textile artists Karolina Bakowska and Ann Dunbar. Bakowska’s embroidery appeared on my Facebook feed through the group Textile Arts. She entitled her work “Gold Polish Autumn” and imposed the white trunks and gold leaves of aspen trees on a vibrant pink batik background. It leapt from the hoop. Dunbar goes even farther. She creates her own backgrounds with watercolour paint, then embroiders the foreground. Her landscapes burst with texture.

My connection with the dragonfly may be as fleeting as she is, but creating her with fibre and fabric opened my eyes to many new possibilities of art and self.

So starting from this image, I really engaged with this assignment. I was struggling with conflicting motivations. The easiest thing to do would be to make some social commentary that undermined the concept of home as an ideal. But I think positive standards around something like home are important. So I had to navigate in my own mind what I would want to set up as a new, more realistic ideal. Going back to beautiful, broken things, here is the windy path I took in my sketchbook.

Research

Process

Final Piece and Statement

home

The concept communicated by conventional “Home Sweet Home” hoop embroidery includes a cherished and safe environment. Happiness, peace and security are ideals portrayed by cute or elaborate patterns. For this piece, I choose to overturn these ideals by violently attacking a traditional pattern and juxtaposing it with an alternate depiction. Simplicity replaces elaborate craftsmanship. Process overthrows security. Imperfection’s wild energy counterbalances that of the organized stitching. The ideal of “home” is rejected, but its remains influence how viewers perceive the new image.

‘home’ may be imperfect, damaged and vulnerable, but framing it demonstrates that it is still worthwhile. There is desperation in the stark, tangled stitching, but there is hope in the a small repair, and commitment in the threaded needle. Home’s sweetness may actually be discovered through the process of creating it.

Embroidery and the development of “home”

Assignment:

“how many words do you know for home (think broadly about the notion of home). (take no more than 5 minutes)”

House

Residence

Domicile

Nest

Den

Pad

Refuge

Cave

My place

Chez moi

Casa

Doma

Living space

Lodgings

Mom’s place

Burrow

Warren

Habitat

Territory

Castle

Village

Hut

Hovel

“Now think about how many words can you think of that deal with Homeless – (broadly)”

Alone

Cold

Vulnerable

Without

Lost

Shame

Poverty

Transient

Uncertainty

Empty

“If an artist were to address the notion of home/ housing/ homelessness; and link this to the notion of common images associated with embroidery, what might be the subject? How might an artist address this within the confines of an embroidered work of art?”

So if I were doing my own satirical embroidered art, I would stick with Home Sweet Home as the wording and stitch a cartoony picture of a mom at her limit. Messy house, kids fighting or crying and mom tearing her hair out.

Or maybe I would do a demolished gingerbread house.

But I think the most meaningful would be a typical home sweet home embroidery of a house and flowers and hearts that had a broken hoop, torn fabric and stitches coming loose, that had been obviously mended. I would incorporate patches and brighter thread and maybe leave some holes.