The other day I was going though some images saved on the external hard drive, deleting duplicates and rubbish, and labeling and saving some interesting pics I’d forgotten about. These were taken years ago, and I still have hundreds to do, but here’s one example, taken during Dorothy Caldwell’s Expressive Stitch” workshop I took at the Fibres West Symposium in 2005. (Where has all that time gone?)
Such an inspiring artist, Dorothy is also a terrific teacher, and we did some interesting explorations in stitch, including learning about Kantha embroidery from Indian state of Bengal and neighbouring parts of Bangladesh. Very basic running stitch and variations are formed into patterns and/or used to tell stories. They’re valued collector items these days, bringing useful income to the women of the region who make this work. Then we each chose a motif from our own life to produce several embroideries in Kantha-style.
I now use this one as my Instagram profile pic, @schwabealison and it immediately put a stop to adoring amorous declarations from wealthy widowed businessmen, body building hunks flexing their pecs while draped over luxury sports cars, and decorated military types posed in uniform in front of mostly USA flags.
In this next photo, I and another student were stitching onto our black fabric while blindfolded, following Dorothy’s verbal instructions which she gave us every few minutes. It was both challenging and good fun !
When we removed our blindfolds, everyone’s panel of the stitching exercise was pinned to the wall.
I don’t still have my class notes, so I only remember that before blindfolding ourselves we all had to make marks down the left side of our fabric that we could detect with our fingers – because these were the starting point for the next instruction. On some of them you can pick them out – on mine for example, shown lowest right.
I don’t think there’s any particular virtue in stitching while blindfolded, but it does point to how mark making in stitch can be truly expressive in creating mood and atmosphere, and many artists today combine stitch with other media – for example as a component of sculptural works like Bernardo Cardarelli’s https://www.alisonschwabe.com/weblog/?p=8142, and stitching into paintings such as Christina Lambi’s work https://www.alisonschwabe.com/weblog/?p=8888 , and Clyde Olliver of UK stitched principally onto or into slate. While writing this, I’ve been thinking of other favourite stitchers, who include Carolyn Nelson , Christine Mauersburger, and Amparo de la Sota, and realise they all use the simplest stitches in very simple ways – straight and running stitch, french knots, fly stitch and stemmed versions of those.
I noticed the other day that someone’s offering online classes on the currently trendy craft/art form of stitching into photos. Good heavens, I’d suggest saving that class fee, gathering up a bunch of old postcards or someone’s family photos from a thrift shop, and just start stitching, trying out different styles from the masses of material online. Once you’ve worked out how you want to do this, then start stitching your own special photo of whatever… because needle holes in paper are not forgiving if you make a mistake, which is one reason why I continue to stitch into fabric – though I have been known to use non-fabric materials in embellishment mode. My PINKS stitcher friends on our fortnightly zoom call today tried to interest in me in exploring ways to stitch into paper, citing some of the exciting sounding ways they treat and use their own favourite papers; and while I never say ‘never’, for the moment I’ll continue with methods that are familiar and comfortable to me for what I am doing in my textile art. For future experimentation I’m interested in a soft sculpture path for the mask project, and I’m thinking about adapting and using the very contemporary needleweaving I just saw, and there are only 24 hours in a day!
I’ve often heard a stitcher say ‘the back of this looks more interesting than the front….’ and though this is not the same, it’s another interesting expressive stitch thing, and those workshop photos reminded me a bit of my post of a few weeks back, “Brainstorming With an Algorithm” on how I gave chatgpt the image of the reverse side of a stitched work and asked it to produce a possible pattern, about which I’m still amazed.