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I’ve had on my to-do of blog posts to write “old embroidery” for a while. For many years, I had a commute that was a four hour round trip. On the way to work I tried very hard not to fall asleep, and keeping my hands busy with embroidery was a good way to do it (I also tore through so many books thanks to Project Gutenberg and a little Nokia mobile with wifi).
I had a little kit in a mint tin that held my needles and some of the thread or other things I needed. A dear friend made me a sort of soft folio container that I kept my projects and other hanks of thread in. The whole kit fit neatly into my backpack and off I went.
The earliest examples of what I embroidered on my Flickr seem to be a series I did illustrating different states, based on what I knew of them (which was not much). This was around 2008.
I started playing more with embroidery as sketching, “drawing” the other commuters I saw regularly on the train. I wasn’t much for cross-stitch, but I did have the aida fabric from various friend’s destashes and a life of scrounging craft materials and it was fun to approach the pixel-like limitations of the fabric outside of cross stitch.
Now, imagine if you will, an internet where a sassy man doing cross stitch could reach viral heights. Bacon and moustaches were the height of… something. Steampunk was doing things (and I was involved, writing about papier mâché, of course). I was in my twenties and found it all rather annoying. So I did a litle cross stitch series about it.
It was a fun, weird time for embroidery online, actually. A friend kept a blog where each post was embroidered and had a scroll-over effect, which I commented on in kind. Writing was sort of a focus for a bit, like this line from Fanny Hill, or this ranking of movie trilogies that I think got on some pages back in the day (the cleaner scan of it has 6k views, lol).
What my true love, with embroidery though, was sculpture. I loved stumpwork for being a great way to use up thread scraps as stuffing. There’s so much structure and thick texture possible.
In my years of commuting I amassed a nice amount of work. I didn’t just embroider on the train though, I liked taking it on trips, like this freeform cutwork practise I did when we drove to Wyoming. Please enjoy the same muslin ground used for this and the one above–I dyed a true fuckload of muslin for a backdrop in theatre than nobody wanted after the show was done so I’ve been carrying it around since and have almost used it all now, some 20 years later.
Eventually, I stumbled on Opusanglicanum, which introduced me to what has remained one of my favourite surface work approaches–laid and couch work. Its an approach I always enjoy, and it’s been around so long there’s something lovely about doing a stitch people have done for ages and ages.
Looking back it feels like it was a couple-year rush of embroidery but then the practise followed me along like a dog. The embroidery tag here on the blog has stuff as “recent” as 2015. I wonder if, from there I in general stopped blogging and also started focusing on other craft. My commute was mostly walking at that point, then a couple years later we moved states and everything changed.
I may not embroider as much as I used to, there’s just so much craft be doing. But the love and the skills are still there and I pulled them out to fix the worn out old cuffs and pockets on this coat I made nine years ago.
There’s a bag, in all my various craft storage, of what work I still have from this era of embroidery that I realise was close to 15 years ago. Maybe when I’m done with my current craft projects (which include crocheting my first sweater!), I’ll return to the stitching I miss.
