3 posts tagged “handmade”
I made this for a Warhol-themed swap online and was pretty pleased with the final product. Rhinestones aren't usually my thing, but it felt right in this instance. Overall, the whole experience was nicely inspiring, and I've now got two more "mostly done" purses and a pile of 8-10 more boxes waiting to become something special. I recently bought some vintage postcards at a flea market and my husband's been bringing home all sorts of inspirational odds and ends, so I'm sure there will be more photos to follow.
After recently reorganizing my craft room and unpacking my craft books, I started to flip through my copy of the Reader's Digest Complete Guide to Needlework and was inspired to do a sampler. Previously, I've always just looked stitches up online and incorporated them into whatever my current project was. However, while I picked up this book originally for its chapter on huck embroidery, I was certain I could learn things about basic embroidery, too.
Starting out with several small pieces of aida cloth and some basic colors of embroidery thread salvaged from my mother-in-law's craft kits, I decided to do each stitch in the chapter. While working on the first few lines of stitches, I thought about how traditional samplers often included moral/Biblical phrases and considered what text to put on my pieces. Originally, I was kind of taken by being very traditional and merely stitching my name, age, and the date of the piece. There was something funny to me about my samplers, made at age 28 in my leisure, compared to those made by girls in their first decade, for whom embroidery was part of their early education (a way to learn their letters, as well as other topics, like geography).
Eventually, I thought of artist Jenny Holzer and her Truisms. They seemed entirely appropriate and, in fact, I'm not certain that I haven't stolen the idea of combining Holzer and embroidery from Elaine Reichek (off topic, briefly: That's really not the best link for her, but there's no Wikipedia entry and Google mainly turns up books of her work or reviews of past shows; if anyone has a better source for info about or images by Reichek, please share!). Anyway, I found a selection of Holzer's Truisms online and selected the shorter ones for my consideration. I've finished two samplers and am part-way through my third:
Overall, I like them a lot. Not only do they achieve the goal of teaching me new stitches, but I think the final pieces are a curious intersection of modern woman and traditional craft and are a unique display of my varied education. Comments and thoughts are welcome. Individual photos of the samplers above are on my Flickr site.
