Tag Archives: embroidery

A Stitch In Stress

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Life does not always co-operative with my goals or my attempts at serenity. Sometimes I have days or weeks where I’m not very creative. One of my practices is to embroider one thread a day.
I’m working on a tablecloth–mundane, printed, a kit. Cross-stitch. It’s big. Sometimes I imagine that at the rate I’m going I’ll never finish it. I gave up on following the suggested colors years ago. I’m just filling it in with blocks of whatever strikes my fancy. As cross-stitch, it mostly all goes in the same direction, until dyslexia strikes.
Really, I don’t want to finish it. It’s going to be a pretty goofy tablecloth and I suspect too large for my table. Plus, I just like cross-stitching it.

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A Family of Poetry Dresses

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I’m deep into a rather unresolved process of putting text on textile, in this case clothes. I started off with seven pieces, and a working title something like “Synesthesia: 7 Days a Week.” I was looking at unfinished embroidery, and either adding stitches or words. Three of the pieces were garments, and they seem to have become their own set.
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Actually, they are a kind of a family. The “mother” is a pink nightie I bought second hand.
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I had the embroidery put on professionally, and although the embroiderer was terrific the old material was so worn it tore. We decided to leave that tear in, because it reflected the text, with its warning against assault or even rape.

Pink Gown

I said, more
than once
never
get in a car
with boys

I also realized today that the tear could be an image of breast-feeding, or nurturance. For there is the “baby” in an antique gown.
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Child’s Gown
 
smell of milk
indoors
swollen womb
     of possibility
blue jug
outside
     grass dunes the sea

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And finally, the child. This was done on a dress that was actually mine, circa early 1960’s.
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Dress With Tags
 
I was like a package
going nowhere
a dress with tags
like decals
on a steamer trunk
but I
was never sent
 
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***
SO–here is the question. What should I do with these?
Make more?
Make a clothesline?
Leave as is?
Create additional but self-contained pieces?

AND–where should they go?
Gallery? (Such as?)
Textile Bomb? (How? Where?)

All advice appreciated.

Starting a New Embroidery and Text Project (and looking for advice): 3 Garments

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It looks like I have found someone to embroider these garments with text. The working draft is below. Your thoughts?

Pink Gown

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I said, more
than once:
never
get in a car
with boys
 
 
***
 
Child’s Gown

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smell of milk
indoors
swollen womb
     of possibility
blue jug
outside
     grass dunes the sea
 
***
 
 
Dress With Tags

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I was like a package
going nowhere
a dress with tags
like decals
on a steamer trunk
but I
was never sent
 

Starting a New Embroidery and Text Project (and looking for advice)

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There is no particular need for me to start a new project, I’m busy and don’t have a venue. But I do have an idea, and materials. I was at a fantastic second hand textile and quilting store in Leadville, Colorado and bought a bagful of things. I also have a dress of mine from childhood. My overall image is of a clothesline piece with seven garments or hangings on it, with some hand embroidery and some commercial (or machine, but I need to find someone who can do that).

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Questions:
1. Will it be emotionally satisfying or creepy to finish a piece someone else left undone?

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2. Do I dry clean pieces AFTER I finish the embroidery? If so, does this destroy the ink pattern?

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3. The piece is partially about my synesthesia, my lifelong ongoing hallucination of the days of the week as colors and as actual people. There are seven pieces. Does each need to be a day of the week?

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4. Is there another word for “weekly”?

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I love the hole in this hanky!

5. Does anyone know how to do machine embroidery?

Any other suggestions?

What I’ve Learned from Knitting

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1. I am not a perfectionist. I’d rather hide a mistake than go back and unravel it.

2. I am not a snob. Although I’ve spent time and money buying hand spun wool from the person who also dyed it I’m equally happy with wildly colored synthetics.

3. I can count. Iambics. Haiku. Recently I got pulled into playing the marimbas at a festive event–the band leader just grabbed me. It was so easy, despite my lack of musical ability, that someone asked me how long I’d been doing it professionally.
Just counting.
Like knitting.

What I’ve learned from embroidery.

1. The back will never look like the front, and that is just fine.

2. I never met a hoop I liked.

3. No force on earth can stop me from licking the thread.

Stitch In Time–embroidery and poem by Miriam Sagan

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embroider the patten
with a split thread
licked and knotted
bringing to color
satin leaf and back tracked stem

cruciform
dragonfly
iridescent wings
in turquoise silk and cobalt

kill time
as time will kill
with each cross-
stitch
a winter’s afternoon
the doctor’s waiting room
warm evening with a waning moon

as time will tell
and also
take me down