{"id":741,"date":"2010-01-17T11:01:02","date_gmt":"2010-01-17T16:01:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/?p=741"},"modified":"2019-08-26T09:30:09","modified_gmt":"2019-08-26T14:30:09","slug":"slow-stitch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/?p=741","title":{"rendered":"Slow Stitch ?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"6"<\/a><\/p>\n

I had an email this morning from a textile arts friend, mentioning something I’d never heard of before – ‘slow stitch’ and ‘slow cloth’\u00a0\u00a0 (and as we all know, ‘cloth’ is a reverent term for ‘fabric’ or as we say in Aus – ‘material’)\u00a0 \u00a0 ‘Cloth’\u00a0 implies something has beeen done to the fabric to give it a whole new meaning, which I won’t go into here – but that’s a slightly tongue-in-cheek observation,\u00a0 just in case you don’t know me well enough to\u00a0hear me speaking between the lines, and\u00a0I digress.<\/p>\n

Since the mid ’70’s\u00a0 I have stitched and studied the art of the stitch, having an exhibiting life as a creative embroiderer years before I found myself in the world of quilted textiles.\u00a0 In all that time I had never come across this term, so of course I googled it. \u00a0To my delight but some amazement, I found there’s a whole new generation out there discovering the joys and expressive potential of the hand made stitch and in particular the most basic stitch of all,<\/span> the running stitch.<\/span><\/em>\u00a0 It’s been around for ever, long and short, in thick and thin thread, string, leather thonging, cord and more, and of course we all know it\u00a0as the stitch most used in hand quilting.\u00a0 It appears in countless ethnic embroideries around the world, as both\u00a0outline\u00a0amd filler.<\/p>\n

Above is a pic of one of the\u00a0small samples\u00a0I did in a workshop,<\/span><\/em>\u00a0 “The Expressive Stitch’, taught by Canadian artist Dorothy Caldwell in Western Australia, more than 4 years back.\u00a0\u00a0 Let me tell you there’s a few hours’ work, perhaps 6 – in that little 6” square piece and I’m no slouch with the needle.\u00a0 We each designed motifs from our own individual lives while we learned about the needleworked \/ embroidered\u00a0 cloth pieces, Kantha, that Indian women in the Bihar region have traditionally made, and which now regularly find their way to collectors in the western world.\u00a0\u00a0Down the years I have seen some very<\/em> old textiles and fragments in museums – most memorable being a fragment of layered brown (dirty?) \u00a0felt,\u00a0\u00a0hand quilted with linen thread in a cross hatch\/diamond pattern.\u00a0 From the outer Mongolian steppe, and dated around 400AD\u00a0 it was\u00a0most likely padding that went between horse and saddle.<\/p>\n

The hand made stitch has been gathering favour in contemporary fibre art for some years now.\u00a0 But what felt new to me was the near evangelical fervour I detected in the bloggings of several recent converts to the expressive, therapeutic, relaxing and calming effects of hand stitch.\u00a0 Of course, the traditional quiltmakers and embroiderers\u00a0have always known\u00a0of these qualities,\u00a0 but now it seems\u00a0that\u00a0some ‘art quilters’\u00a0 are\u00a0tiring of frenetic zooming all over cloth with fancy computerised speed regulated machines, and\u00a0responding instead to the\u00a0slower pace of hand stitchery with it’s minor imperfections …\u00a0 if you wait around long enough, most things come back into fashi0n again, in some form or other :-p<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had an email this morning from a textile arts friend, mentioning something I’d never heard of before – ‘slow stitch’ and ‘slow cloth’\u00a0\u00a0 (and as we all know, ‘cloth’ is a reverent term for ‘fabric’ or as we say in Aus – ‘material’)\u00a0 \u00a0 ‘Cloth’\u00a0 implies something has beeen done to the fabric to […]<\/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":[173,174,175,170,171,172],"class_list":["post-741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-calming","tag-cyclical-nature-of-fashion","tag-fads","tag-hand-stitch","tag-slow-stitch","tag-therapeutic"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6uxpF-bX","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741","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=741"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5148,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741\/revisions\/5148"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alisonschwabe.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}