Finding my design

I’m working on a cross-stitch piece right now, and I’m pretty happy with it.  I’ll show pictures once it’s closer to finished and I can get a good shot (I’m moving a good camera with a macro lens closer to the top of the “to buy” list for us, perhaps I’ll get it with the tax rebate if indeed it shows up).  I think the reason that I’m happy with it is because I decided, a while ago, that instead of trying to make art that looked like something else I’d seen, I’d try instead to work with the kinds of shapes and patterns that come to me naturally.

I always doodle big, interconnected masses of swirly shapes and spirals.  I don’t know what led to this epiphany, because it’s not like I was really drawing on a regular basis or even making art of any kind.  But suddenly I thought, oh.  My visual artwork would be much more authentically me if I used my own “voice,” as it were.  And then it seemed logical that the swirls would be the basic vocabulary I should use.

I guess I thought of art as something that I needed to get a lot better at before I could really do anything I would be happy with.  But now that I’ve had this realization I’ve felt a lot more free and natural when I’ve created things.

And since I’ve started embroidering, again, I have had this sort of freeing of ideas.  It’s like I’ve found a medium I can really think in.  Suddenly I can think of ten million things that would work as cross-stitch, or regular embroidery, and I already have a queue of projects in mind.  I think of ideas all the time and that’s like going from zero to sixty; I wasn’t thinking visual art at all a few months ago.  I credit Amanda with getting me started on the path, actually.  Reading about her book made me open the drawer where I’d stashed my yarn and crochet hook, which led to me poking around my mom’s house for more crochet hooks, which led to me opening the box with all the embroidery stuff, which led to me making a little monogrammed cute cross-stitch thing for Miri’s birthday, which led to my idea to make a swirly free-form cross-stitch piece with the leftover floss, which led to me having ten billion other ideas.

I’m trying to hold it in until I get my thesis and these other two (!!) papers written over the next few weeks.  But at least stitching is something you can do in the interstices.