2015 Year in Review

It was a big year of changes for me (most of them wonderful).  Through the midst of it all, I managed to have a very productive year.  In fact, I completed twice the number of projects that I did in 2014!

1.  First, I completed my verses for the Torah Stitch by Stitch project.

2.  I embroidered a beautiful Scrub Jay for Studio MME's e-book of patterns.

3.  I couldn't tear myself away from the cuteness of Fibery Friends.

4.  This adorable Grumpy Cat went to a very happy owner.

5.  My in-laws were touched to receive a reminder of their travels in Pretty Little Sydney.

6.  I gave Christmas Celebration to my friend Julia.

7.  I gave Christmas on Gingerbread Lane to my friend Cassie.

8.  I made Terry's Poem for my mom's friend to remember her late husband's promise to her.

9.  I made Golden Girls to thank Laura for being a friend to my mom when she needed one most.

10.  Steotchalong 2015 will make my husband the envy of everyone in his office.

11.  My brother's family loved the cute creepiness of Halloween Spooky Sampler.

12.  My husband would also take Mom with him to work if it weren't for some rules about office decorum.

13.  My friend Angela loved Cherry Blossom Festival Sampler as a reminder of sushi-related fun times.

14.  My Festival of Lights got a little brighter with the Chanukah Stamp.

15.  The year isn't officially over until I finish the yearly sampler from Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery.  With the end of Story Time Sampler, I am ready for 2016.

I finished 7 Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery projects, 4 cross-stitch projects from other designers, and 4 embroidery projects (three of them original designs).  At this rate, I completed an average of 1.25 projects per month.  I think my WIP challenge really helped me be more productive.  Creating a smaller list of projects to work on helped give me enough variety not to feel stuck, but limited the focus of my work enough to get more done on each one.  I'll keep that in mind for next year.  Can I top 15 projects?  Let's find out!

Mother's Day

I have been a big fan of animated sitcoms ever since I started watching The Simpsons . . . when it first started in 1989 . . . and I was five years old.

I love them for their sharp humor, colorful designs, and the way they can covertly tackle topics that live action shows can't.  One of my favorite shows is Futurama, about a pizza delivery boy who gets cryogenically frozen on the eve of Y2K and wakes up in the year 3000.  I started watching it in high school and stuck with it through two cancellations and four direct-to-DVD movies.  Indeed, Futurama is responsible for my marriage.  I met my husband at an event for Jewish grad students.  Futurama is his favorite show of all time, and he was instantly smitten with me for my ability to quote the show verbatim.  For our first Halloween together, we went as Fry and Leela, the show's main romantic couple.

But it is almost Halloween, and I am not here to talk with you about romance.  I am going to talk with you about Futurama's villain--Mom.

Mom is the CEO of MomCorp, a large corporation that she uses to amass her fortune and monopolize the world's resources.  One of the businesses she owns is Mom's Friendly Robot Company, which manufactures all the robots in the world.  She can use this to her advantage, inciting a robot revolt with the push of a button that she keeps in her bra.  In interviews, she speaks with in a sweet grandmotherly tone and wears 1890's style clothing.  In private, she wears a skin-tight catsuit and reveals her ugly personality through colorfully vulgar language.  She has three bumbling sons that she berates when they inevitably fail in their tasks.  Sometimes it looks like she will rekindle her on-again, off-again relationship with Professor Farnsworth, but the relationship always ends when Farnsworth remembers how evil she is.

A few weeks ago, &Stitches announced they were doing a "Fictional Villains Stitchalong."  I immediately had an idea--an embroidered portrait of Mom with one of her famously filthy quotes:  "Jam a bastard in it, you crap!"

I'll admit that I briefly considered a line from a deleted scene, "Make that bitch your bitch, you bastard!"  My husband felt that this one was more creative in its use of swears.  When I showed him the finished product, he said, "This is why I love you so much."  Clearly, sharing pop culture is the secret to a successful marriage.

The Wind Cries Mary

Sorry for the radio silence in the last couple of weeks!  I have had a lot of exciting developments in my life that I will explain later.  (I will tell you that no, my husband and I are not expecting a bouncing baby stitch.)  These changes have left me with little time to stitch or write, but I am getting back in the swing of things.  In the meantime, my mom sent me pictures of Mary's poem, which she had framed and gave to Mary.

Mary loved it so much that she hugged it.  It will be there to remind her of her husband's promise to be there in the breeze.

For Mary and Terry

My mom met Mary when they were both working at Children's Hospital in Chicago.  They became friends quickly, and soon my parents became equally close with Mary's husband, Terry.  For almost 40 years the two couples would get together socially, talk on the phone, and celebrate milestones.

Last winter, Terry passed away after a long struggle with colon cancer.  Part of his process for saying goodbye was writing a poem for Mary that he wanted included in the program at his funeral.  Afterwards, my mom asked me if I could make embroidered art of the poem.  I'll admit that I was hesitant at first because I had just completed my first commission.  (It's been several months, and I am still getting nightmares about my client calling me on the phone to scream, "I HATE IT!  CHANGE EVERYTHING!")  But even when I wasn't trying to think about it, I began to form ideas in my head of how this piece would look, so I agreed to do it.

These are the last two lines of the poem.  I wrote them out in swirling, flowing lines evocative of the wind imagery in the piece.  The first line is dark blue, with each subsequent line in a lighter shade of blue.  The last word is two strands of white thread with one strand of silver Kreinik.  I'm going to mail this to my mom, who will frame it.  My mom loves the final result and I hope Mary will, too.

Mary,
Develop a sensitivity to soft breezes
because if the dead do come back,
it'll be my words against your cheek.
Always remember, my love,
that walking through life with you
has been an honor and a pleasure.

I Can Haz Grumpy Cat

For a silent auction at my synagogue, I donated the opportunity for me to embroider the winner's favorite quote.  A very nice woman won that item, and explained that she wanted a piece of art that was inspired by her favorite refrigerator magnet.  An embarrassingly long amount of time later, I have finished her piece.  Behold . . . the cutest angry cat you will ever see!

I worked on this during Saturday mornings at Home Ec.  He quickly became a favorite among my friends, especially after I filled in the eyes with satin stitch.  The woman wanted the cat to have calico coloring like her own pet.  I'm not a cat person, so I had to look at a lot of Google images to get something resembling the real thing.  Like the lion on the Torah mantle, I used seed stitch to fill in the color patches.  It's less tedious than using satin stitch, and I like the way it is suggestive of fur without looking photo-real.  That's what I like about embroidery as a medium--using a variety of stitches to create images that are suggestive of real images, yet with a more interpretive and artistic style.

Last Friday, I went to Home Ec and framed the piece in a hoop.  They had a pretty purple flower ribbon that I used to decorate the hoop.

The woman gave me a big hug and told me she loved it, but my favorite reaction was that of my husband's:  "It makes me want to hug and pet the cat until he stops being angry."

Looking Back at 2014

In January, I wrote a post about my stitching goals for 2014.  Let's see how I did . . .

1.  Finish, finish, finish!
This year, I managed to finish the following projects:

Winnie the Pooh Quote

Polar Bear

Drop Cloth feather stitch sampler

Torah mantle

FPS's Mysterious Halloween Town

FPS's Autumn Harvest Festival

Uncle Morrey's WWII Diary

Hopefully joining these will be the Once Upon a Time sampler.  I've got a week left!

Of course, this barely makes a dent in my craft queue.  Some of these projects were really ambitious due to their size and complexity.  I think that I have finished a decent number (thanks to HabitRPG!) and I have reason to be proud of my accomplishments.

2.  Submit another entry into the State Fair.
Succeeded x3!  I got two ribbon winners, and placed higher than last year.

3.  Try a new technique for transferring patterns.
Thanks to the light pad I got for my birthday, I have now transferred several patterns through the tracing method.  It really opens up the possibilities for designing my own patterns.

4.  Learn blackwork.
I bought a kit.  Does that count?

Next week, I will share my goals for 2015.  What did you accomplish this year?

Happy Thanksgiving Project Update!

I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving!  Little Red Riding Hood is heading over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's house for a slice of pumpkin pie.

I have an exciting update--my WWII diary embroidery won 2nd place in And Stitches E-zine's Old Stitches New Tricks contest!  I have some fun prizes coming my way, which I will show later when I can.  In the meantime, you can check out their comments on me and the other winners.

Stitching a Memory on Veteran's Day

AndStitches e-zine, the blog that I was a guest writer for over the summer, is hosting a contest.  The challenge:

1. Pick something old--a vintage pattern, inherited materials, an antiquated style of embroidery, etc.
2. Use it for a new purpose that is different from how it was intended.

There are all kinds of wacky directions a creative embroiderer can go with this.  Make a traditional crewel embroidery sampler . . . with neon colors!  Cross-stitch . . . on waffles!  I am excited to see what other participants created.  When I saw the contest rules, my mind went in a different direction.  I had a project that I have been planning on doing for a while, but the contest gave me the impetus to do it.

During World War II, nearly all of the adult men in my family served in the United States armed forces.  The one who saw the most action and survived was my great-uncle Morrey.  He was a gunner on a B-17 in the 8th Air Force.  He was stationed in Eye, Suffolk, England, and flew in campaigns over Germany to knock out Nazi oil refineries.  If you survived 25 missions, you got to go home--and he flew 35.

Morrey never had children, so my dad got his war memorabilia.  The box contains pictures of his experiences, including remarkable ones taken from the air of bombs dropping and anti-aircraft flak.  At the bottom of the box was a little notebook, every page counting up from #1.  My great-uncle had written the details for every mission he flew--targets, weaponry, casualties.  This is the stuff that history books are made of.  One page, in particular, caught our attention.  It was about a mission that had major difficulties and losses, captured with minimal yet evocative description.

I had my challenge.  The old:  the page from Uncle Morrey's diary.  The new:  use embroidery to capture this moment in history and in his life.

It appealed to me for many reasons.  Starting with my Stitching Shakespeare project, I've been fascinated by the idea of using embroidery to capture handwriting.  Just seeing someone's penmanship style can bring back memories, and it is an experience that future generations will have fewer opportunities for as most of our written communication goes digital.  I liked the challenge of trying to stitch in a way that preserves the quirks of one person's style.

I also liked the juxtaposition of portraying war, the ultimate masculine activity, through the traditionally feminine folk art of embroidery.  As I talked about in my Craftivism post, the combination of these two elements gets people's attention.  Embroidery is also a way of making this memorable page last longer.  Paper may degrade, but at least cloth and thread will preserve it for just a bit longer.

For the background, I selected an off-white fabric that has little fuzzy bits of different colors.  I think the effect is called "oatmeal."  It reminds me of the wallpaper in our old house . . . anyway, it made me think of low-quality notebook paper.  For the handwriting, I used the leftover bobbin of Weeks Dye Works in Blackberry.  It is a hand-dyed thread that subtly changes between dark blue and dark purple.  I picked this color in particular because it reminds me of the way dark blue or black ink fades overtime, taking on a purple hue.

My dad copied made an enlarged and high-contrast photocopy of the page.  I then used my light pad and a pencil to transfer the image onto the fabric.  It took me about 5 weeks to embroider the image in backstitch.

As I continued to work on it, I also found that it was a way for me to communicate with a relative who is no longer here to tell me his experiences.  I don't know how long it took him to write this one small page, but I have been living with his words every day I've worked on this.  I looked up the details surrounding this air battle as I came to them.  Where was this town?  What was going on during the war at the time?  I also thought about how Morrey experienced this event.  What was going through his mind?  How did it feel to have to write about the death of his fellow airmen?  Did he think about it often after the war?  How did he cope with it?

Line 1:  Mission #22, flown on February 6, 1945
Line 2:  Towns in Germany with Nazi oil refineries
Line 3:  Twenty 250-pound General Purpose bombs used
Line 4:  Anti-aircraft weapons used
Line 5:  Target of mission, railway yards leading to oil refinery

Casualties

I'm treating this as a "proof of concept" for a more complex project in the future.  I could turn this into an illuminated manuscript, providing footnotes to explain each line of the text.  I could print Morrey's pictures onto cloth and attach them to the larger picture, crazy quilt style.  I could make this a giant cornucopia of stitched images to illustrate the horrors of war.

For now though . . . I just didn't want to do anything to detract from my great-uncle's words that manage to say so much with so little.  Thank you for your service, Uncle Morrey, and may all those who served in the armed forces feel appreciated on this Veteran's Day.

[And thanks to my parents, who went through their closets and made all of these copies without me telling them why.]

Torah Mantle (Part 2)

It was a long journey, but this weekend I finally completed the Torah mantle.

I worked on the final patch over the weekend during brunch at Home Ec.  As I worked the final appliqué stitches, I actually felt myself getting choked up--because I was nearing the end of my largest and most significant project to date, and because I wished that Auntie was here to see it.

Over the several months I worked on this project, I learned a lot of important lessons that I will carry with me as I continue to hone my skills.

1.  Ingenuity
With its polyester (?) woven fabric and construction, I had to figure out entirely new strategies for stitching compared with what I had done in the past.  My solution was to embroider designs onto cotton fabric patches, then sew the patches onto the fabric.  The result was a design that was easier to stitch while adding more color, which is what my customer wanted.  You can see the individual patches in my Flickr album.  If I am open to new ideas, I can stitch with more unusual materials.

2.  Entrepreneurship
This was my first commission, and I have a much better sense of how I will deal with paid work if I choose to do it again in the future.  I learned to get as many details as I can, and to advocate for myself while also listening to the customer's needs.

During this time, I was reading a thread on "Ravelry" in which knitters and crocheters gave ideas on how to respond if someone says "you could sell those!"  Many people would answer, "I do this as a hobby.  If I sold them, that would be work, and work isn't fun."  That is a real concern when considering whether to turn a hobby into a business. Suddenly, you can't just make anything you want because you need to devote some time to the project that you are selling.  I discovered some tricks that helped me balance my crafting time.

For example, while I was in the final stages of sewing on the patches I did all of my work at Home Ec.  It was easier to sew there because I could lay the cover flat on a table and avoid distractions.  (Note:  I don't consider chai tea and mocha-frosted cookies to be distractions.)  The cover was bulky, so I began keeping it at my day job's office to avoid lugging it back and forth on the bus.  I discovered that when I kept my commission work in a separate physical location from my house, I was much happier and relaxed at home.  If it wasn't in my house, I did not feel the pressure to work on it 24/7.  Lots of artists and crafters rent out studio space in which to work.  That won't be possible for a long time, but I now understand the psychological value of maintaining separate work and home spaces.

3.  Perseverance
There were times when the project felt overwhelming, and I was so close to giving up.  After waiting for the panic to subside, I would come upon an answer that made the job easier.  My customer was depending on me, and believed that I could do a great job.  Sticking to it was worth it, and I feel like now I can accomplish anything!

As I held the finished project, I said a prayer known as the Shechecheyanu.  It is an all-purpose prayer to thank G-d for bringing us to this moment in time, and it seemed appropriate to say on a new work of creation.  May I continue to create beautiful objects and grow as an artist!

Project Round-Up--8/26/2014

With all of the Fair preparations, it has been a while since I posted my progress on other projects.

The August square of the Once Upon a Time Sampler covered "The Musicians of Bremen," a fairy tale about a group of farm animals that saves the day.  Not very many people I've talked to have heard of this one, but I know there was a Muppet special about it.

I never did post a final picture of my polar bear, so here he is.  By now, I have gotten him framed and he is sitting on a shelf in my living room.  (If you would like to learn this shading technique, Nicole has another class starting in September!)

Mysterious Halloween Town now has a haunted house.

At some point, I felt like I needed a change from backstitch and cross-stitch, so I whipped up Dropcloth Sampler of the Month's feather stitch sampler.

And to top it off, I am making progress on the Torah mantle.  After completing this name plate, all I need to do is one more lion before I stitch the patches onto the cover.

You must be wondering how I find the time to do all of this.  I've been stitching for at least 3 hours a day, barring some other event.  Most of this is just cutting into time that I would have spent noodling around the internet, or watching TV.  (Of course, I still watch TV, but now it's productive!  The Simpsons marathon has been an awesome time to catch up on projects.)  I think it's really helped my peace of mind to keep my hands busy, and the satisfaction of completing a project lifts my spirit.

I have also been thinking about this Cracked list on ways we sabotage our lives without knowing it.  One of the points the author makes is that your life will be better in the future by way of you magically becoming someone else.  We all have ideas about what we want to do or be in the future.  "In 10 years, I want to have higher-paying job in IT."  "In 5 years, I want to be fluent in French."  And yet, we tend to not spend any time during the day actually working towards these goals.  We just think it will happen, somehow.  If a goal is important to you, start working on it TODAY.  I have a vague idea that I want to get better at embroidery and do something significant with it.  Start a business?  Put my work on display?  Teach classes?  Whatever this goal turns out to be, I know it will require me to keep improving my skills, and I'll move closer towards that goal with every stitch I make today.

Torah Mantle (Part 1)

After a couple hiccups, I am finally making great progress on my Torah mantle!

To refresh your memory, a Torah mantle is a cloth cover that is placed on the Torah when it is not in use in order to protect the parchment from debris.  They are usually ornately decorated, often using goldwork and applique.

As my first commissioned piece, it was very important for me to create what the customer wanted.  He had requests for symbols, some Jewish (lions, crown) and some personal (scales because he is a lawyer).  He wanted an emphasis on red, yellow, green, and blue colors.  He is also a fan of Marc Chagall, a 20th Century Jewish artist who is best known for more abstract, expressionistic work and stained glass.

With all this in mind, I found images that managed to represent the symbols he wanted without being too realistic in style.  I altered the pictures so that they were black-and-white outlines, then used printouts of these pictures to trace the design onto colored fabric.  I enjoyed using my light pad and discovering that it worked just as well with colored fabric.

I'm going for a fairly simple style with these pieces.  I'll use one color thread for each picture except for the family name, which will have a multicolored floral design.  The outlines are done in backstitch, with some other stitches for decorative details.

This is my take on a Judaic symbol known as the "Lion of Judah."  Animal imagery in Judaism has an interesting history.  It is against Jewish law to worship idols or make graven images, but Jews could never agree on whether representational art of people, animals, and plants counted as graven images.*  Sometimes, disagreements erupted even between Jews in the same community!  In Europe it was a common occurrence for a rich man to donate an item like a curtain for the Torah ark decorated with deer, only for the town's rabbis to argue over whether they could actually use it in the synagogue.

The only exception to this debate was lions.  The Twelve Tribes of Israel are each represented by a symbol, and the lion was the symbol for the tribe of Judah.  This association traces back to Genesis 49:9, when the patriarch Jacob blessed his son Judah by calling him a "young lion" (gur aryeh)  Tradition dictates that most Jews are descended from the tribe of Judah, and this is where we get the term "Judaism."  Because of this history, lions have been a popular symbol for Jewish ritual objects.

Another symbol I've made is the crown (keter).  Lots of torah mantles include this at the top of the design as a symbol of learning and G-d's majesty.  I played around with the details on this picture, using chain stitch for the band of the crown and buttonhole wheels for gems.

Once I am done with each symbol, I will sew them onto the torah mantle.  I've learned a lot at every stage of this process.  I am grateful for the opportunity to not only try doing a hobby I love professionally, but for the opportunity to grow as a Jewish artist.

*My favorite example of this issue can be found in one of the synagogues in Venice.  The walls of the sanctuary are decorated with famous Biblical scenes, but they tried to find ones where they could get away with not depicting people, flora, or fauna.  One picture is of the Red Sea after it drowned the Egyptians, with chariot wheels poking out of the water.  Another is of Moses beating a rock with his staff to bring forth water, but Moses is holding the staff from "off-stage."