Stitch

Stitch is my joy! As I sit at my sewing machine, drawing with the needle while moving the fabric freely with my hands, I revel in the way the thread creates lines and texture, merging the often-diverse elements of my art—whether painted cloth or such other media as metal or paper—into a new, textured whole. For the past four years, however, stitch had also turned into my artistic nemesis: a key aspect of my fiber-art practice that anchored me in my past as a traditional quilter and stood crosswise to my current artmaking. Because I profoundly love stitch, however, I needed to figure out how to merge my new work as a fiber artist with my decades of stitching experience.

The other day, the penny dropped: all these years, I had remained mired in an understanding of stitching that was grounded in the practice of quilting. Every book and magazine article dedicated to this craft drums it in, over and over again, that it is essential to cover the piece cohesively with stitch lest it will be distorted and won’t lay flat. Supported by photographic evidence of wavey edges and bulging quilt surfaces resulting from mixing densely quilted areas with sparsely stitched ones, the message of these master quilters is clear. An overall consistent coverage of the textile piece through quilting is the key to a successful outcome, whether a whole-cloth quilt or one that is pieced or appliquéd, especially if the piece was large.

But I am no longer making traditional quilts. I create fiber art that draws on art quilting as one of its constituent elements. Because I am now creating wall art, often on canvas, the technical requirements for traditional quilting-coverage are no longer relevant. Yet despite shifting the parameters for using stitch in my fiber-art pieces, I am not jettisoning such stitch: on the contrary—the longer I am working in fiber art, the more I am committed to exploring stitch in its different dimensions.

Fiber and mixed-media artists often turn to hand stitching, a tradition that harks back for millennia. Using stitch as accent marks in their compositions, they savor the texture and idiosyncrasy of the thread laid down by hand. The Dutch photographer, Jackie Mulder, for example, integrates stitch as a distinctive component into “Thought Trails,” her series of photography-based collages. British fiber artists Claire Benn and Helen Terry prominently use hand stitching for mark making. Indeed, hand stitching is having a renaissance because of the slow-stitch movement spear-headed by Claire Wellesley-Smith. Susan Brandeis even opens her magisterial book, The Intentional Thread: A Guide to Drawing, Gesture, and Color in Stitch (2019), with the admonition: “We live in a world where everything, from commerce to transportation to information, moves faster and faster. But the absence of speed in the handmade stands in opposition to that hurry, offers an antidote to frenzy and commotion, and is one of the reasons I love handwork. I am drawn to the ‘meditative’ quality of working slowly at human (rather than machine) speed” (p. 6). And I tried…

My work does, indeed, contain some hand stitching, but I use it sparingly, both for aesthetic reasons and because of the developing arthritis in my fingers. Hand stitching can hurt (and I don’t mean finger pricks). Aesthetically speaking, hand stitching clamors for attention. French knots and long stitches with gorgeous pearl cottons have a strong visual and textural presence that can add powerful accents, but they can also overwhelm the cloth. I have done quite a bit of reverse sewing (aka unpicking) after having added too much hand stitching. It is a splendid tool, however, and I do enjoy wielding it, albeit sparsely.

It is not the much maligned “machine speed” that has me turn to my trusted Bernina as a fiber-based drawing tool, but the extraordinary richness of stitch-making that it offers. Sometimes, all a piece needs is an overall effect, merging the layers into a new cloth, one that translates the texture of weaving into stitched fiber art. I love the textural quality that matchstick-quilting creates, a kind of warp thread that turns the cloth into the patterned weft. In a recent piece, Augenmusik (eye-music), I modified the stitch by grouping five lines together as if they were hand-drawn music staves. This form of mark-making is unique to machine stitching: the smooth line created by the entangled top- and bobbin-threads cannot be replicated by hand.

In many of my pieces, stitch draws on textures of the natural world: grasses, water, bark, sand, clouds. Stitch has the power to evoke these elements through abstracted shapes that reference visual patterns that we encounter in nature but does not strive to replicate it. Stitch is its own medium. In the end, it is neither pen nor paint brush. When Cas Holmes creates what she calls “stitch-scapes”—small pieces of fiber collage that serve as sketches for her textile landscapes—she turns her sewing machine into a textile-specific drafting tool (Textile Landscape: Painting with Cloth in Mixed Media, p. 24–25). By contrasting the abstract with the evocative, I can create particularly complex marks in fiber art that push the abstracted even when evoking the representational, as in the shift from match-stick quilting to a rugged pattern evoking choppy water in Blue Sun: Heron. Using evocative stitch can also highlight areas that remain unmarked by thread, deliberately smooth and flat against the adjacent ripples of a stitched section.

Both Blue Sun: Heron and Ghost Forest #3 integrate stitching in another manner completely unique to working with a sewing machine: that of what could be described as “thread art.” The Australian fiber artist, Meredith Woolnough, calls it embroidered art. By stitching on a dissolvable stabilizer, she creates magnificent filigree pieces just with thread. I adapted this technique to create recognizable (through not realistic) components for my artworks, whether a heron or a tree trunk. Moreover, stitching on dissolvable stabilizer also allows me to create thread nets that can create texture, together with painted cheesecloth and needle-punched silk and wool.

Writing this post drove home to what extent I use the creative possibilities of stitch to make marks and to generate texture are extraordinarily extensive. What a gift stitching offers to artists! The medium itself is multidimensional both in its visual allure and its tactile character, which may explain why I started this post with the words: stitch is my joy!