stitching together a lovely, messy, chaotic life

nearly a month after my disappointment at not getting hold of a kit that would enable me to participate in the dataspejlet community art project at trapholt museum, i was at a friend's house for a board meeting. i saw that she had a kit and i told her how sad i was that i missed out on getting one. i snapped a picture of it there on her side table, but that sense of sadness and being on the outside of something i wanted to be part of welled up in me again and i found it almost too painful to look at. i even thought the colors she had gotten were great and would have been so much fun to work with. she told me that her neighbor also had one and she would ask her if she was going to use it. i went away a little bit hopeful, but still mostly resigned to not getting one.

then, a week or so later, my friend sent me a message, telling me she'd left me something up in our creative group's workshop at the library. i crossed my fingers that i knew what it was and i was delighted to find that she gave me her own kit. i breathed a sign of relief. 

oddly, i didn't start stitching on it right away. i got out my data files and chose the words i wanted to work with and i drew a sketch on some graph paper that husband had lying around on his desk. and then, i went around pondering it in the back of my head for a couple of weeks. i'm one who always works best close to a looming deadline. and i wasn't doing nothing - i was pinning stitch inspiration on pinterest and thinking about how i wanted to express the words i'd chosen. i was also keeping an eye on the #dataspejlet hashtag on instagram, but not a lot of posts were being shared and i didn't want to have to open the dreaded facebook to go see what people were posting in the group. plus, i figured it was best to do it my way anyway, without too much inspiration/influence from others.

but during our long weekend, i finally got stitching. it was beautiful out in the garden, on the pillow-covered bench between the greenhouses. i started with the circle representing husband. it has a circle within it that represents sabin. 

i chose the golden mustard color for husband and pink for sabin - my colors were those, plus purple. i probably would have chosen other colors if i were choosing myself, but these were what i had to work with and i do like them. i decided to  completely fill those two circles with stitches, because they represent the two people who complete me. 

the next circles that i worked on were the overlapping ones representing time/reality and cats - funny that those overlapped, but i think the time/reality comes from posts i did about reading murakami and of course, cats figure heavily on my facebook page. i chose to leave more "air" in those circles, not filling them out completely with stitches and there, where they overlapped, i used both colors, plus i added the third color, to show that the interesting part is where my preoccupations overlap. 

and then i turned to the similarly overlapping circles representing ships and LEGO. i filled those out with little + signs (i should note that we were only allowed to use stitches that go horizonal or vertical, no side-ways or curves or french knots or fancy stuff). and i stitched three hearts in the space where they overlapped, to signify how much i do love both. they are both from my work life, but both have become something of who i am.

i really enjoyed sitting in the sunshine, stitching. when i needed a break, i'd get up and pull a few weeds or water the plants or plant a few seeds. and i picked myself a small bouquet of fragrant lilacs, my favorite flower, to have at hand while i stitched. i sat in the sun with my big sun hat on and enjoyed the meditative stitching, seeing where it would take me and what thoughts it would provoke.

i didn't get it all finished on the weekend, so monday after work, i started my second to last circle. this is the one where i chose a group of words from the data, as they all seemed related and harmonious together. they were: story, fabulous, beautiful, sunshine, awesome. and reality was in that circle as well. i think it's my favorite circle - the three colors complementing one another best. it was also one i stitched most intuitively, letting the colors tell me where they wanted to be and how many stitches and the length. it simply felt freer than the others, which felt careful and deliberate. i liked this one best.

it was getting a bit dark by the time i finished, but i took a picture anyway. i'm pleased with the result. and then on tuesday, i had only one circle left to do. the bad one. 

we were given white thread to use for stitching those bits that we wished weren't there or which we didn't want anyone to see. for me, that circle came down in the left lower quadrant, far from the other circles, which was good, as i hate to have this word touching any of the positive words. and the word for that circle was trump. i used couching, i think wanting to keep that embarrassing evil clown under control, limiting him and tying him down. that stitch came to me naturally and intuitively as well. funny how those last two circles were the most intuitive, like i had to have warmed up to the stitching before i could let myself go.

and i thought a lot about stitching outside the circles and i can see now that others have done so - stitching connections between them and such. and i thought i wanted to do that as well. but as i began - trying to make a joyful spray of stitches surround my favorite circle at the top - they came out awkward and not at all how i envisioned them, so i picked them up. i think it would have worked if i could have used french knots, but alas, they weren't allowed. so, i decided i was content to only show what the data showed and keep the rest of my lovely, chaotic, messy, awesome life for myself.

i'm so happy i got to participate after all and i'm very grateful to my friend for giving me her kit. it meant a lot and the meditative stitching time was just what i needed during a very busy time at work. i can't wait to see how my work will fit into the larger work that astrid skibsted puts together at trapholt this autumn.  it will inevitably be a dialogue with the many other embroiderers and the whole will be so much greater than the individual parts and yet they will be beautiful and unique on their own. and i'll bet it will be harmonious and lovely, messy and chaotic, just like all the lives that went into the data that went into all those stitches. and we will all belong exactly where we are in the work. 

this awesome, beautiful, fabulous life

i submitted my dataspejlet work to trapholt electronically today, so now, i only have to drop it off. i still need to write a post about how i got my hands on a kit, but i'll do that next. 

they have a form to fill out where you can write a 1000 character description of your work. that's a crazy small amount for all the thought and hours that went into it. here's what mine said:

i loathe facebook, but have been there for many years, so it made sense to use it for my dataspejl. interestingly, the data did rather accurately reveal what's important to me - husband (yes, i call him that, like it's his name) and daughter, their circles overlapping, very fittingly. the next circles, all very close in size represent other things i love - like cats and ships and LEGO. my #2 circle featured words like "time" and "reality," which surely come from reading and posting about Murakami books. i chose to do one circle in white, as the frequent word there is one i'd like to forget - trump. it's also an outlier on my grid - away from the others, which seems right. but to end on a happy note, the circle where i used all three colors in a crazy quilt sort of pattern was full of words like "story," "fabulous," "beautiful," "sunshine," "awesome" and again, "reality," - leading me to my title and to the realization that yes, my colorful, loud, messy life is rather fabulous.

submitted this process photo - as i thoroughly enjoyed sitting in the sunshine in the garden, stitching away last weekend.

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you also had to fill out which words you chose to work with and mine were:

husband, sabin (which i submitted as daughter, for the sake of anonymity), cats, ships, LEGO, time, reality, story, fabulous, beautiful, sunshine, awesome and yes, trump. 

so weird to boil my life down to 8 circles and a dozen or so words. it seems so paltry and yet still, it did capture something. i tried stitching outside the circles a bit, to indicate that my life is much more than just those 8 confined and sometimes overlapping circles, but took it away again, because it felt like it didn't capture it. instead, i chose to go with the snapshot those 8 circles offer and keep for myself the messy chaos of the rest of this awesome, beautiful, fabulous life. 

of data mirrors and a sense of belonging

part of the dataspejlet (data mirror) project at trapholt museum is small piece of personal embroidery. you actually download your data from facebook and your search history from google chrome and send it in to a model/algorithm that the museum has created for the project, and it returns a quadrant diagram with circles on it representing the words that appear most frequently. if you click on the numbered circles, the words change, so you can select the ones you wish to think of while you embroider and create your personal "data mirror." 

i think because the algorithm is surely set to danish, it has returned some weird words for me - like "lov" which is surely actually "love" in my posts and not "promise" if it were danish and the "ll" that's surely from "we'll" and "it'll" and other contractions. i have no idea what the placement of the circles on the quadrant means. 

the museum had kits available in set colors - you get two colors to use, plus white, which you should use for the words that appear a lot, but which you don't want to count in your stitched picture of your data. unfortunately, i didn't get my hands on a kit, not imagining that there were only a few available, but i suppose it makes sense since the artwork can only be the size it can be. i have felt more disappointed than is warranted that i didn't get a kit. i plan to work with the graphs on my own anyway and this way, i get to keep them. and decide to use as many colors as i wish.

and i am getting to participate in the woven part of the work, so i am still a part of the larger work. in my disappointment over not getting a kit, i realized, once again, that being part of a community is important to me. i wanted to see my stitched data mirror in dialogue with all the other stitched data mirrors - to have a visual depiction of how and where i fit in the scheme of things. to contribute to something beautiful that only becomes more beautiful in dialogue with everyone else's work. i feel genuinely sad that i don't get to be part of that. and it triggers that old familiar feeling of being on the outside (i really should get therapy for that).

i think i also wanted something beautiful to come of all that data i stupidly gave to facebook all those years. it was nice to think that something good would come it somehow, when they've used it for nothing but evil and nefarious purposes. 

my chrome history diagram is much less interesting since it's so full of work-related stuff like kitchens (in no less than four languages) and dashboards and the project management software asana - which i visit regularly. i wanted to submit my blog data, but their algorithm couldn't handle the amount of data. i don't think my google visits say that much about me as a private person, but they do say something about me as a work person. 

but i guess that whatever i make of it is for myself. and maybe that's ok. but i would have liked it to be part of something bigger. sigh.

stitching identity :: kgb museum vilnius

we had three teenagers with us in lithuania, so we told them we had to visit a museum. after perusing a swedish brochure we found at our rented apartment, they chose the museum of genocide victims, mostly due to its other name - the KGB museum, owing to the fact that it is housed in the former KGB headquarters (look at me, capitalizing KGB...hmm, i'll have to ponder that) of the soviet state of lithuania.

it's a moodily-lit place, in keeping with its sober subject, and has a big focus on the lithuanian patriots/revolutionaries who resisted the soviet yoke, especially in the decade after stalin and hitler sealed their fate without consulting them in a secret agreement in the early days of the second world war. the green cells in the basement, where prisoners were held, interrogated and tortured and then, quite literally, taken out back and shot, were stark.

but i think it was most struck by the stitched objects on display. most were made by prisoners who had been exiled to camps in siberia. they obviously used scraps of fabric and thread that were at hand. stitching to hold onto their homes, loved ones and traditions. and the stitched items were made by both men and women, both having a need to cling to their home and memories.

the sign said that this little black striped pouch contained some lithuanian soil and that the prisoner had kept it with him throughout his confinement in a siberian hard labor camp. i have a jar of stones from south dakota, where i grew up, so i could relate to this. we have a need to hold onto something tangible of where we come from.

some of the stitched cloths were large and all were beautiful. each stitch holding a memory of home and comfort and family. such beauty coming out of such adversity. it's amazing.

it was also a way of keeping their religion and belief alive, as sometimes the cloths were used in religious rituals and at holidays, like easter, which they surely practiced at great peril.

there were other objects, made of materials at hand - birchbark containers and the like, but i found the stitching most fascinating. especially since it wasn't just women who were stitching, but men as well, in a human need to hold onto beauty and home.

there were many pouches, which surely held precious mementos, like the wrapped-up soil of home or a photo of loved ones or a locket. there were also sayings, carefully stitched in lithuanian, a way of physically holding onto language and culture. each stitch a small act of defiance against the oppression, each stitch a way to hold onto an identity that was being torn away.

and i wonder if my soft guns aren't a similar way of coping with the sense that my very foundation has been ripped away by that ridiculous clown that cheated and colluded his way into the white house, robbing me of any pride i may have had in being american. maybe not, but they are definitely an act of defiance and mocking of the gun culture that has so strongly taken hold. not as deep as the items in the genocide victims museum, but a small act against the regime nonetheless.

stitched up party invitation

probably the coolest technique i learned at anne brodersen's class was this one...a new way of stitching up photos. normally, my stitched up photos are done on the machine, but for this one, i made a couple of small embroideries - of a bottle and a glass of wine and i embedded them into a picnic photo that i took at the viking market in bork havn. i love the result. i'll be doing more of these. for sure. to start with, as invitations to a gathering we're going to have when my family is here next month.

this was my first attempt and i didn't do a great job of cutting off all my pen marks. but next time, i'll do better.

don't you think it would make the perfect party invitation? now if the weather just warms up for their visit!

combining stitching and objects

i haven't yet shared all of the techniques i learned at the course last weekend. this is the one i'll likely use on my torso - we stitched some fine little embroideries onto very thin (but surprisingly sturdy) rice paper with ordinary sewing thread. when they were finished, we carefully ripped the paper around them, leaving a border to work with.

then we stuck the little embroideries onto a printed photo with a glue stick.

i chose to paint the rice paper with watercolors to match the photo background behind, but you could paint it another color and make them stand out.

i was looking for some kind of allusion to how denmark's past is also here in the present.

another technique we learned was how to set embroideries onto a stone or piece of driftwood. i took a piece of embroidery from a second-hand shop to use for my attempt. you trace around it and then cut out the shape in a piece of fiberglass wallpaper. you then glue the embroidery onto the fiberglass wallpaper and press it in a book to dry.   after that, you take colored pencils and draw around the edge. you can either choose to match the piece of wood or stone you're setting it on, or use a contrasting color. i chose contrast.

then, you glue it well, press it onto the stone or driftwood and wrap it in plastic film and then paper towels and then put on a bunch of rubberbands to hold it in place. we let it dry overnight. my fellow students used driftwood and theirs were dry by the next day. mine, which was set on a stone, was still pretty wet, since the stone didn't help by absorbing any of the moisture.

once it's fully dry, you can use colored pencil to blend it into the background better - mine was too wet that day, so i haven't done that yet. this is a technique i definitely want to play with a bit more, using my own embroideries and all of those stones i've been gathering.

now i'm off to print some photos to play with. what are you creating this weekend?

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fascinating photo series of children around the world with their prized possessions. 

stitches and paper and paint, oh my!

another of the techniques we learned at anne brodersen's wonderful weekend course involved small embroideries and bits of torn handmade paper that we painted with watercolors. we tore up a 5x7 piece of rice paper and assembled the little bits on a sheet of scrap paper.

then we painted them with watercolors, in colors we thought either matched our small embroideries or (if you were me) colors we liked. i had no idea what my embroideries would look like, as i had to rush home and make some that evening while watching downton abbey (episode 2, season 3, so shh on what's going to happen).

yup, another shot of those fetching watercolors. what is it about them? they're so photogenic.

the next day, our little bits of tissue-like paper were dry and we could begin to assemble them into a collage. i stitched up some small fantasy animals based on helleristning (it was either that or feathers).

we laid out the little stitchings and our bits of paper into a pleasing pattern and then pinned them to the handmade paper base underneath. the next step was to stitch them all in place. it was a bit challenging not to get all tangled up and poked by pins at first, but it got easier as you could remove pins on the bits that were sewn down.

tho' anne recommended using a fine thread, i chose this variegated thread that was a bit thicker because the colors were perfect with the colors that i had painted on my bits of paper.

i like the confetti-like quality it gave in the end, tho' i'm not entirely convinced it matches my little paleoglyph animals. they are a bit frolicsome, so i'm choosing to view it as a good first attempt. everyone i show these to likes this one best (my own favorite is the one with husband). it has a very cheery, bright, happy quality that i think accurately reflected how i felt at the course.

this is what elizabeth made - you can see that her single-thread stitches (from a neat old spool of variegated blue thread that i picked up in an antique store in the states last summer and gave to her) have quite a different feel. her sweet little circle stitchings tell a story of the barriers we have around us as people and of a family. but i'll let her tell you that story herself (she hasn't told it yet, but do keep checking her blog, as i'm sure she will).

our other fellow-student created this bright, springy, eastery piece. it also has a bright, cheery quality that i think reflected how we all felt at the course - happy and open and bursting with color and creativity. it was such a wonderful environment, working with a patient and good teacher in her light, inviting, inspiring atelier.

and this last piece shows how anne herself has used the technique. she's more sparing with the stitches attaching the paper bits. and i am very inspired by her teeny tiny embroideries. i'll definitely be pursuing this technique as a way of incorporating some embroidery onto my torso.

it was such a wonderful, inspiring weekend and i'm not done telling you about it yet, so stay tuned for more. in fact, it made me so happy that the troglodyte's latest dictatorial outpourings just rolled right off me. proving that having good energy yourself can go a long way towards deflecting any bad energy you come across. it's just a matter of filling up the tank.

a new take on stitched-up photos

i took a weekend embroidery course with artist anne brodersen at her studio out in ringkøbing, near the west coast of denmark. it wasn't a typical embroidery course, where you learn stitches, but where we learned some unique new techniques for combining embroidery and photography and embroidery and other materials (like sticks and stones found on the beach). in addition to learning some really inspiring new techniques, my very soul feels renewed.

we took a photo with good lines to it and traced out the best of those lines with a pen. then, using a lightbox (must have husband build me one of those), we transferred those lines onto a sheet of handmade paper that could withstand stitching. then, with two black threads, we stitched those outlines. i chose this photo of husband looking down at something on the beach. the water, the horizon and husband's silhouette seemed like the perfect subject matter for my first attempt.

it took me awhile, but i stitched up all my lines and then it was time to add watercolors. me being a sucker for non-fiction, i didn't intend to stray too much from the colors of the water and the photo as it was. it did end up a bit bluer than my photo, but that had more to do with my color-mixing abilities than with what i actually wanted to do. i clearly need some practice to achieve the colors i want.

i love the notion of combining my many photographs with paint and stitches and i want to explore this technique further. i think it will push both my photography and my stitching, not to mention my painting skills. it feels like anne was able to open a door to a whole new world of possibility for me.

longtime readers of my blog or those of you who know me in real life, may have noticed that i'm not the most patient person in the world. both stitching and working with watercolors on handmade paper require patience. patience that is difficult for me. i was actually fine on the stitching part and even achieved that meditative state (when i wasn't philosophizing on the intersection between art and craft) that i can't seem to achieve in actual meditation. stitching the black lines helped me clear my mind of extraneous, racing thoughts and i was just there, in the moment, stitching. it was wonderful and relaxing.

in places, my watercolors were too wet and they bled through my stitched lines. unfortunately, right there where  it made it look a bit like husband had had a little accident. happily, on the second day, anne showed me how to fix that with some pastel pencils that i brought along, so it wasn't the tragedy it seemed at first.

i still haven't fully processed the experience - it was two days and they absolutely flew by. we drank tea and discussed art and artists. we talked about how giving and open anne was with her techniques and how even tho' they were unique and "secret," in passing them along to others, she didn't diminish what she herself was doing with them. the three of us who attended each achieved something very different with our individual applications of the techniques (i'll show photos of that in another post). for each of us, it was quite unlike what anne was doing and somehow reflected our own personalities and preoccupations. it made me think that there needs to be a whole lot less fear about sharing out there in the art world.

here's my finished product. we backed our delicate works with interfacing, to make them a bit more sturdy and i'm going to find a frame for it and hang it here near my desk, to remind me of husband when he's not around and of an inspirational weekend where i began the next chapter in my personal creativity.

i'm already started on the next one, using one of my many shots of the field across from our house. i can't wait to get stitching.

the second photo in this post is one of anne's works, where she used this technique on a photo of obelisks on a beach in bretagne. she takes to the level of art, don't you think?

more on the other techniques i learned and what my fellow students (including elizabeth) made in another post.