{"id":2409,"date":"2013-09-21T19:53:41","date_gmt":"2013-09-22T00:53:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/?p=2409"},"modified":"2013-09-21T19:53:41","modified_gmt":"2013-09-22T00:53:41","slug":"the-glorious-straight-stitch-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/?p=2409","title":{"rendered":"The Glorious Straight Stitch 3"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last year, fibre artist \u00a0Kathy Loomis<\/span><\/a>\u00a0\u00a0blogged daily\u00a0on a hand stitched square, which I failed to register while the project was going, but today I lobbed in to\u00a0her blog,\u00a0and\u00a0found lots of little pictures featuring chain and coral stitches, French knots, fly stitches, and several others\u00a0used regularly through her\u00a0samples.\u00a0 I commented on how my fav. is the Straight Stitch\u00a0plus any stitch\u00a0variation\u00a0which you can do with a ‘stem’ – so stemmed French knots, stemmed fly-stitch,\u00a0 etc, which in turn reminded her of these very expressive variations, plus another I’d forgotten about till just now –\u00a0the Cretan stitch, seen in this\u00a0detail of “Out Back of Bourke” 1987, full pic in pre-1988 gallery on this website.\u00a0\u00a0 For all those stitches, and probably more I’ve forgotten, you can make those legs reeeeally long.<\/p>\n

\"Autosave-File<\/a><\/p>\n

Back in 1977 I had a fabulously inspiring creative embroidery class\u00a0in Darwin, NT Australia, with a woman I can’t find anywhere on the\u00a0web, Laurel Fraser Allen.\u00a0 She opened my eyes so wide I couldn’t sleep the night after my first class.\u00a0 Through her I realized the potential of hand stitchery,\u00a0 which was so much wider than\u00a0my own mother’s smocking and counted thread works on linen.\u00a0 I found Jacqueline Enthoven’s “The Stitches of Creative Embroidery” and studied it but, looking back it wasn’t very ‘creative’, more a stitch dictionary and paper precursor to the diagrammed stuff you see on the internet today by people who style themselves ’embroidery artists’, but really aren’t.\u00a0 It was very stimulating, though.\u00a0 In\u00a0the next few\u00a0years I bought several books that have stayed with me even if they aren’t\u00a0 actually here in Montevideo but languish on my bookshelves back in Perth , Australia.\u00a0 One is\u00a0Nik Krevitsky’s\u00a0 “Stitchery, Art and Craft”<\/p>\n

\"Nik<\/a>\u00a0 about which I can find nothing much\u00a0where you would expect to find info, but let me tell you, it is a fabulously inspiring book that I treasure – lots of straight stich embroideries and woven textures, and\u00a0I’ll have a read next time I go back.\u00a0\u00a0Between 1977- c.1985\u00a0 I attended several summer school type courses with prominent Australian embroiderers who taught the\u00a0English ways of ‘design it yourself’ embroidery on subjects that mean something to you personally – so, I haven’t embroidered anything from a kit and very little from any patterns, instructions, samplers since I was a kid learning how to embroidery a traced linen table doily… which I still have, the crudely crocheted edge and all.\u00a0 I’ll blog it sometime.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 These days I let my needle wander, or ‘draw’ for me.<\/p>\n

Looking around for\u00a0 “contemporary embroidery artists”, I struck gold, there’s a lot there, and\u00a0I came across\u00a0two names new to me,\u00a0whose websites\u00a0really caught my attention: Kathy Halper<\/span><\/a> whose embroidered drawings in mostly straight stitches explore the world of teens and the social media in which they operate and communicate\u00a0– quite marvelous, and plenty more images when you search her name.\u00a0 Then I found Melissa Zexter <\/span><\/a><\/span>who embroiders over\u00a0photographs\u00a0of portraits and landscapes\u00a0with various stitches mostly straight, some arranged into meshes\u00a0and motifs that seem like an interpretive curtain over at least part of the image if not all – heaps more of wonderful images if you search her name.<\/p>\n

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Last year, fibre artist \u00a0Kathy Loomis\u00a0\u00a0blogged daily\u00a0on a hand stitched square, which I failed to register while the project was going, but today I lobbed in to\u00a0her blog,\u00a0and\u00a0found lots of little pictures featuring chain and coral stitches, French knots, fly stitches, and several others\u00a0used regularly through her\u00a0samples.\u00a0 I commented on how my fav. is the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[212,210,170,211],"class_list":["post-2409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-embroidery","tag-expressive","tag-hand-stitch","tag-straight-stitch"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6uxpF-CR","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2409"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2409\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2421,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2409\/revisions\/2421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}