Stitching

More Ideas for Projects

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I bought these 3 pieces at a boutique in Shanghai. (Doesn’t that sound exotic these days!) I treasure them and consider them art pieces. They are around 5 ½” square. The shop sells women’s designer clothes. The owner also makes one-of-a kind and bespoke fashions. She keeps her sewers busy and uses the scraps to reduce waste.

You can see that the stitches are random which I love. The many layers are fringed on the edges which makes wonderful borders.

 This one is even thicker than the white one and the fringed borders are really dense. The back is shown in the next photo.

This is the back.  There are many layers. Some of the inner pieces seem to be of different dye lots. This starts me thinking about possibilities!

I couldn’t resist the third one while in the shop. These were lying on a table and I nabbed them while everyone else was looking at the clothes (which I thought wouldn’t be for me). While the others were looking at everything, I found a top that I adore. I think I was the only one in our small group who bought clothes.

Here is the back of the sweetest one. The blanket stitches on the edges make good borders. It’s only 2 or 3 layers thick. It feels like a pad but not nearly as thick as the others.

A Wonderful Sashiko Workshop with Lucy Arai

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Here is Lucy teaching in her Sashiko workshop at Slow Fiber Studios in Berkeley, CA.  She gave invidivual attention to anyone who needed it. The workshop was 2 1//2 days. I had one day free before it started after I got back from Japan. Traditionally white cotton thread is stitched on cotton indigo fabric.Here near the end of the workshop she was showing how she stitches on paper that she paints and stitches on. Her art work is fantastic–sometimes has gold leaf and sumi ink. [click photos to enlarge]

A nice picture of Luci.

This is a square cloth used in Japan for wrapping things–called a furoshiki. The pattern technique is called sashiko. It is entirely done with running stitches. We learned about the culture of sashiko and the ins and outs of stitching. There was a lot more to it than one would think. Note that the corners are reinforced with the stitching.

This is how the furoshiki is tied to make a bundle for carrying things. The corners are reinforced where the knot is to be tied.

Here you can see the corner fringes where the tie was made at the reinforced corners.

Reminding Myself How to Hemstitch with My Kindle Book

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I needed to hemstitch the other day and had to get out my big book, Weaving for Beginners, which was so big that it made it impossible to do the stitching. So I got out my Mini iPad and opened up my Kindle book on hemstitching. Perfect–then I taught myself again how to make the stitches. I was all thumbs at first but when I got it, it was quick and easy.

Then I got out my iPhone and it worked better than ever. What fun! I learned to hemstitch way late in my weaving life so on one piece I even forgot to use it.

So, I got it! Since this will be on the hem on the back of the piece, I didn’t need to be careful about having every group of threads the same size. The reason here is to keep the last wefts from unravelling. You should leave at least an inch of warp on the piece before cutting it off the loom.

You can get a copy of my Kindle Hemstitching booklet for just $2.99 HERE.
Next month I’ll publish my third booklet. This one will be about a unique way of “Tying On New Warps”. FYI: the second booklet is “Weaver’s Knots“.

Jacket to be shared!

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Here’s the jacket–Cathy Cerny and I are sharing it. I have the summer when I go to Japan and Cathy has the fall when her exhibition opens in the fall. After that we’ll dicide how the sharing will go. Neither one of us could bear to part with it.


Here’s a map of where I’ll be for the 11th International Shibori Symposium. I’ll begin around June 23rd or so. Bye for now! 

Indigo Dying and Stitching in a Boro Workshop with Yoshiko Wada

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If you are viewing this in an email you may not see everything I put in this post, for example, a photo gallery. Please click the post title above to see the whole post.

Stitch Book

The workshop was two consecutive Saturdays ending over the weekend. My creative juices went wild. I worked really hard the week between sessions to get as many ideas as I could started. My glove leaked when we made simple and effective indigo vats each day. On Easter Sunday I began to work with my weavings that I dyed in the class and here are some of the results. The yellow piece I dyed in my kitchen at home with turmeric (an idea I brought back from India). We also focused on stitching for Boro (mending) and here is the beginning of a book of sample stitches–all running stitches plus the knots I had to learn how to make.Some stitch work was inspired by Kantha cloths from India. The cloth I own has back stitches as well as running stitches, so I practiced some of them.

The patching work I did isn’t finished yet but is exciting, too. You will have to wait for a future post for that. It has been wonderful to be so inspired and energetic. Thanks, Yoshiko!  [click first photo]