Final weekend of the the embroidery course. I have really enjoyed it even when things haven’t gone to plan (white embroidery). It has certainly gotten me thinking about skill(s) and material(s) in different ways. On the wall in the studio hangs a small piece – woven from dead-stock satin ribbon. It’s not like anything else that I have made … well perhaps it’s rather like the porn/interior design weave in that it’s woven, the similarities though stop there.
I came in to Stockholm a day early so that I could go to the Sewing & Craft Fair and pick-up a few more spools of the satin ribbon. If it weren’t for the embroidery course I should never have thought to go to the fair and the weave piece would not have been made. There’s something about the piece that really appeals to me – the shiny-ness of it, the formal qualities, the colourfulness, the graphicness. The grid-ness(?) of it is masculine, the materiality of it is feminine(?) I remember as a child enjoying taking my felt tip pens and a sheet of graph-paper – my father was a maths and physics teacher – and putting dots of colour into the tiny squares. I can’t remember if I worked in patterns though I imagine that I would have done – I was that kind of boy. The weave piece takes me back there via everything that I have experienced since. It is a kind of time machine.
