Welcome to the first edition of Gear Threads, where embroidery meets the gears of industry!

Well, OK, today it’s more likely the circuit boards of industry, but you get my point. We’re going to be here each month featuring inspiring embroidery created using a machine, either through the more classic handmade style often known as free motion embroidery, to the traditionally more commercial art of digitized machine embroidery.

Digitized machine embroidery is the kind that your machine sews out for you, and though at first glance that might seem to take the “craft” out of the equation, far from it. Not only can amazing things be done with digitized designs, but one must remember that there is in fact an artist behind the creation and the craft of those stitches that your machine is diligently stitching out.  It’s most certainly an artistry, and a bit of wizardry, in itself.

Since we’re going to be sharing the awesomeness that machine embroidery can be, we thought it would be good to understand a bit more about the creation process, know as digitzing, that goes into making this kind of embroidery. That’s why today we’re here to talk to accomplished digitizer Erich Campbell of Black Duck Embroidery about just what goes on in digitizing, so we can peek into the world behind the stitches.

So, let’s ask the question everyone usually wonders of us: how did you get into embroidery, and especially digitizing? Was there something in your background or experience that led you to it?

Truthfully, I am a misplaced academic. My degree is in English with a focus on medieval studies. I started working for a screen printing and embroidery company early in my college career, hucking boxes of shirts around in an old delivery truck. I moved my way up to operating embroidery machines, and it was revealed to me that we had a digitizing system sitting under a dustcover that nobody had been willing to learn.

I decided I had to know how to drive those big commercial machines. I’d been mucking about with graphics on computers since I was very young, plotting them out pixel by pixel in 256 colors (which was amazing at the time). Couple that with the fact that my mother was a seamstress at one time, and I had this package of being unafraid of all of the elements and acquainted with the real, physical properties of the thread and machine, and a fair knowledge of graphics. Within three months, I was a full-time production digitizer.

What was your first impression of digitized embroidery? What was it like to learn?

It was everything I’d wanted from creating digital graphics. Here I was going to create a three-dimensional object from something I’d plotted on a machine. Moreover, I had control over every movement, allowing my “hand” to come out in the work.

Learning was incredible. The truth of the matter is that I had little time to question what I was doing, so I made my best attempt logically to break things down, and it turned out that the way I think is just compatible with the process. I think in layers and sequences, and building up what I consider to be this rather shallow sculptural relief that is an embroidered design made sense.

Don’t get me wrong, I had some of the same difficulties everyone has in my own degree, especially with the disjoint between the perfection on-screen and the distortion that the machine imparts. Once I realized that embroidery was an art of distortion, wherein one plans for the movement, the push and pull of the fabric and thread, the tensions and the overlaps, I started to understand. I studied on my own, performing tests to see what I could achieve — seeing how different fill patterns, methods of color blending, densities and thread types behaved on a variety of substrates.

I felt very much like some early scientist trying to describe a new world I’d discovered. It was, and still is, an amazing and inspiring process.

I’ve heard our own digitizers mumble sometimes that people seem to think all they do is “trace” things. Can you talk a little about all the challenges that go into a design, especially balancing the art with the science?

Digitizers interpret art. What is created after we digitize is not simply a translated version of what was already in the source image — it is an entirely new piece based on the original.

There are scads of variables we have to keep in mind with every element of every piece of art we interpret, and those change greatly depending not only on our artistic considerations, but also on the size of the finished piece, the material on which it will be stitched, the colors involved, and the type of thread to be used. For every area that must be filled with stitches, we must select the type of stitch, the length of the stitches, the angle on which they’ll lie, how close together the stitches will be placed (known as density) and account for any distortion that will take place in the sewing of the design, not only in the element itself but in all elements with which it will interact, all while we take into account the limitations and strengths of our machines and our materials. Machines do not perfectly recreate what we draw in stitches on-screen, and it must be known by experience what will happen when the machine starts to run at speed.

A digitizer worth the title can look at a design at size and tell you what stitch each element will use, and where all the potential problems in the design may lie. A truly proficient digitizer can do all that, make improvements to the design through using the particular properties of thread to reflect light and show dimension, creating decorative elements and visual styles that aren’t even present in the original, all the while keeping the amount of trims, color changes, and traveling through the sequence to a minimum. The best will be conscious of nearly every stitch, and use only what is needed to create the proper impression of the original art.

Do we trace? Certainly we do, but with quite a difference.

What advantages/disadvantages do you find with machine vs. hand embroidery, specifically with the look of the final results?

The most obvious is that, though it can be done and I have certainly done so, machine embroiderers don’t usually work one stitch at a time — we work with areas filled programmatically with stitches. We control how they are filled, but it takes more time than a commercial digitizer usually enjoys to tweak each individual stitch. The control hand embroiderers have is superior — they adjust by feel to distortion and can vary the tension of each stitch as it goes, so they require few of the tricks we must do to make things register and come out the shape they intended.

Moreover, they can work on both sides of the material and create complex stitches that are impossible to us. I can fake it to some small degree, but I can’t really make a feather stitch, or split stitch, and I certainly have no hope of a real French knot! Many other techniques, like couching, trapunto, or sequin work, have specific machine attachments and materials or processes that allow us to use them, but we are restricted by the need for such equipment. Machine embroiderers must hide traveling stitches on the front of their work and tie off and trim anything they cannot hide. The best of us have developed tremendous skills at this game of hiding stitches and properly planning where things start and end (we call it pathing) but you may never know how much I’d like to be able to hide my travels behind my piece.

Original photo source, left, and the on-screen digitized version, right

What do you wish people appreciated more about your job? Or, what do you wish people knew about your job that most don’t?

I wish they knew that we don’t just scan in an image and have the computer automatically convert it into stitches. There are software packages that do so, but they have none of the craft that a digitizer does, and most frequently create designs that are as painful to run as they are to look at. A scanner can’t choose to break up a silhouette into a single-color carved relief, or choose how to split a serif from a letter just so that the light plays over each element as it moves. It can’t decide to shift a gradient to create a better progression of colors, or choose outright to remove, resize, or replace elements that damage the piece. We are interpreters — we know the language that thread speaks, and we render two-dimensional art into that language of embroidery. There are so many choices to be made, and even the most simple letter may be composed of six or seven distinct elements that have to be created. I’d like people to know how much thought goes into each piece.

Do people ever say to you, “Oh, machine embroidery, that’s not a real art”? What do you say to that?

Mostly, I don’t bother to answer. Many people will say that it lacks the humanity that something done without a machine has. That said, I think there is art of its own kind in any time someone consciously makes choices that affect the piece. It’s easy to defend those who digitize, because we select and place our stitches, choosing how they will render our subject, but I’d even fight somewhat for those who use stock designs. They can select colors, placements, threads, and substrates; they can choose to express something even without placing or moving a single stitch. I think that most people who believe machine embroidery can’t be art have relegated it to a world of Disney branded embroidery machines with packs of built-in designs that never change or expand. That’s just not representative of what is possible now, especially as digitizing software becomes more accessible to more people. What was once punishingly expensive can be had in a more limited capacity for free — anyone who wants to start learning how to create their own designs can do so if they are willing to research, test, try, and ask for help from those like me who love the craft and who are willing to help. It may not be high art, but we express a great deal with the symbols, designs, and signs we wear, and machine embroidery is key to that. Who wouldn’t want to grab control of that machinery and express themselves?

What tips or advice do you have to people who would like to try it for themselves?

If you can, intern at a commercial embroidery shop or at the least get hold of a home machine or someone who has one, and watch designs run. Operating machines will teach you a tremendous amount of the possibilities and limitations of the craft. Knowing fabric and how it reacts to being hooped and embroidered is always worthwhile. Add that to knowing how machines operate and what they are capable of, especially if you manage to watch the work of a truly skilled digitizer, will likely teach you as much as a good book, provided you whip out a ruler and take some measurements on occasion. After that, seek out some skilled digitizers online. We’re here, and many of us are helping people every day. Check out trade magazines like Stitches or Impressions (reader beware, I write for Stitches) who have free digital editions of their magazines online. You may not be in it for business, but they handle the nuts and bolts better than a lot of home-embroidery sources I’ve seen out there, and the skills do transfer. After that, it’s all about trial and error. Don’t get discouraged. Just watch, analyze, try, and try again. You can do this.

Melanie Kay is a textile artist from Manchester who creates domestic textiles from beer cans and recycled materials.

“I am intrigued by things that I hear and read as well as the things I see.  I take inspiration from the media, the theatre or even a film which allows me to take an introspective approach to my work and merge aspects of fine art and design.  The desire for my work to be meaningful influences the things that interest and astound me which in turn influences the way in which I work.

“Being experimental with the materials I use has enabled me to be innovative and inventive in the way I portray my imagery. I like to illustrate figuratively to encourage thought and portray sinister events in an aesthetically pleasing way. My aim is to catch the eye of the observer and draw them in before revealing the true happenings concealed within my work.

“Using beer cans as a surface for my work has meant that I have had to be innovative in the way in which I transfer imagery onto the cans. I begin my illustrations mostly in pencil and then use various textile techniques to transfer the imagery onto the cans including, printing, heat pressed textile vinyl, hand and machine embroidery. Not wanting to be limited by textile processes I have experimented with processes such as sanding and punching. “

I met Melanie at the Knitting & Sttiching Show in London and was iintrigued by her work and the accompanying narrative. Melanie’s use of beer cans as the materials for her work relates to domestic violence and the secrets that take place behind closed doors. Drink can be a demon, and one that can hide in plain sight; Melanie’s charming pieces are more sinister than they first appear.

Find out more by visiting Melanie’s website.

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The Cutting & Stitching Edge is brought to you in association with my book!

Welcome to eMbroidery, a series of interviews with male embroiderers. This month, Paddy Hartley.

Name: Paddy Hartley

Location: Dalston, East London.

Main embroidery medium: I use Bernina Designer digital embroidery software. I used to apologise for being a ‘digital’ embroiderer, but haven’t for a long time as it’s a whole other skill set in itself.

Noteworthy projects or pieces: All of the pieces I made as part of Project Façade, my own personal response to the medical records of facially injured WW1 servicemen. In particularly, the pieces about the lives of servicemen William Spreckley and Henry Ralph Lumley.

How did you come to be an embroiderer? Through necessity. Embellishing the military uniforms I work with representing the facially injured seemed logical for many reasons. The surgery they underwent involved stitching the outer fabric of the body, the skin. In addition, the servicemen who underwent multiple surgeries where hospitalized for months, years at a time, so rehabilitation played a major part in their recovery, many of whom took up embroidery. Up to that point Id never considered embroidery as a medium I could use but it lent itself to the work well.

What does it mean to you? Throughout the making period of Project Façade it was an appropriate means to an end. I had a 1-year making window in which to embellish the 16 uniforms with which I was working, to embroider clear narrative in both images and text. At the start of the project I had never embroidered by hand, let alone digitally, so getting to grips with the software and translating it to fabric was a massive learning curve.

Where do you like to work? Wherever I can concentrate, increasingly I’m finding that I need silence to work. No email, no mobile. Bliss!

How do people respond to you as a male embroiderer? Usually with a raised eyebrow, but then with fascination because of the subject of the work, particularly when who you think the least like people engage with the work. Like the guys in their 40s/50s who look like builders, being dragged around a group exhibition by their wives which featured some of my work. On more than one occasion I’d see these guys pacing the space like the walking dead until they saw my work and they could engage with the work because of the subject of the work which just happened to be embroidered. You can engage anyone with using any media or process so long as they have an interest in the subject.

Who inspires you? Right now, the students I meet around the UK when I’m guest lecturing. With the phenomenal rise in tuition fees, you have got to be committed to what you do if studying the subject Id going to land you in such eye-watering debt. Arts education and where you get it in the UK is undergoing an incredible change right now and in the years to come as many creative industries courses will close as a result of students being unwilling to get into such massive debt for a qualification in an industry which essentially doesn’t exist. As an example my own training in Ceramics is becoming an unviable subject for Universities to offer so what was a healthy number of under and post graduate courses has become a handful. I think we are going to see a very different breed of artist, craftsperson and designer emerge over the next few years in the UK. Ultra ambitious with a very astute commercial eye and many of whom will not be University educated and they are all going to give us a real run for our money!

How or where did you learn you learn how to stitch or sew? Im totally self-taught but if I need advice, I have friends who I can fling the odd question to if Im scratching my head, but usually, I can work out a solution. It may not be a conventional solution to a problem, but if it works for what Im doing, that’s fine by me.

How has your life shaped or influenced your work? It’s very much the other way around, what I do has made me the person I am and each project I work on changes me (for the better I hope) just that little bit more.

What are or were some of the strongest currents from your influences you had to absorb before you understood your own work? In making the work about the facially injured servicemen for Project Façade, memories of the men shared by relatives was a revelation, but had to be handled with immense sensitivity. I learned to not include all the gory detail, that’s sensationalist and exploitative and disrespectful to the men and their families. So I learned to distill their stories down to fragments which the viewer has to piece together.

It would have been easy to have embellished the uniform pieces with lots of images of the subject with his graphic injury and images of surgery. That would be crass. I kept the use of such images down to a minimum and often placed them discreetly on the piece.

Do formal concerns, such as perspective and art history, interest you? I cant say I have much interest in art or art history so it doesn’t really play a part in what I do. I relate to the subject of the work directly rather than looking at how others may have dealt with similar subject matter or material. I used to feel guilty for saying Im not much of an art lover. Saying you are an art lover is like saying ‘Im a TV lover’…I like some art, just like I like some TV. Most of what is around is dross, lazy and badly made, but there is the occasional gem which sparkles every now and then.

Do you have any secrets in your work you will tell us? Yes, when a piece feels like it needs a little something more, take something away instead.

How do you hope history treats your work? Kindly, if it is remembered at all.

Where can we find you and your work?

• www.paddyhartley.com for an overview of all my work over the past 20 years including Project Façade highlights.
• www.patrickianhartley.com for my fashion design, Face Corset work.
• www.projectfacade.com for the Project Façade work in its entirety.

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eMbroidery was created with the support and wisdom of the magnificent Bascom Hogue.

See more great things at The Blue Pixie’s Flickr photostream.

Hi everybody! It’s Saturday, and you know what that means – so if you’re ready, scroll past the hamster and get to it!

WARNING!

NSFW SATURDAYS WILL CONTAIN CONTENT THAT IS NOT SAFE FOR WORK!

IF YOU READ THESE POSTS, AND ARE OFFENDED, WE’RE SORRY BUT WE DID WARN YOU!

I always enjoy seeing work that is new to me.

There’s lots of lovely things to see in The Blue Pixie’s Flickr photostream. Check it out!

NSFW Saturdays are brought to you in association with
Subversive Cross Stitch, the original snarky stitching site!

After a brief hiatus, the Cutting (& Stitching) Edge presents the final selection of Nike Schroeder‘s work.

Over the past few weeks we have seen the terrific breadth of Nike’s stitched work. Cool. stylish and filled with character, her pieces exemplify where cool embroidery is at right now.

These two self portraits are from the redline series. The dangling threads traverse the fourth wall and add drama to the pieces.

We round the showcase off with two pieces from the Brown series.

Nike displays great skill in capturing human behaviour and then playing with space and non-space. I can’t get enough of this kind of work.

You can find out more about Nike on her website, and be sure to check back over the previous posts about her, to truly enjoy this terrific talent!

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The Cutting & Stitching Edge is brought to you in association with my new book!

For the month of June, the Cutting (& Stitching) Edge is sharing the work of LA-based Nike Schroeder.

This week we are featuring the first four works in Nike’s Shortstop series: ”I transformed small photobooth snapshot pictures into lifesized stitched artwork.

“The inherited immediacy in the actual photo is counterpictured by the elaborate detail and work that went into the picture displayed. It presents itself as a great challenge to not be able to edit the images or make a selection, but taking the strip as is.

“These photos were taken 2010 in Los Angeles in a bar called the short stop and is still a present piece of work. I have collected new strips and the plan is to also stitch them.”

Using needle and thread, Nike takes time to capture snapshots of unplanned behaviour. The tension between the length of production and the immediacy of the content is apparent in Nike’s description of her deliberate non-editing of these pieces. With a process like this there is a constant opportunity to modify the content and it takes some discipline to resist it; Nike honours spontaneity as best one can with embroidery.

You can find out more about Nike on her website, but be sure to check back here next week for more of her terrific work!

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The Cutting & Stitching Edge is brought to you in association with my new book!

Harriet Maxwell is an embroidery artist from London, England. She creates machine embroidered portraits.

“My current work is focussed on the portrait, on the subtleties that can amount to the representation of a person. By looking closely at the face, I concentrate on the layers of pattern, colour and contours that create the subtle qualities of the skin. I like the idea of looking so closely at a face that factors such as gender and age become ambiguous and unimportant. I am more interested in small, gestures, how a slight turn of the head can reveal new details, how a change of lighting can transform colours, altering the perception of a face.

“With the use of the Irish sewing machine, I am able use stitch as a drawing tool, to create both fluid patterns, dense areas of rich colour and thick textures, allowing the stitches to combine to form a sheen evocative of flesh. I use stitch in much the same way as paint, creating marks with the needle in the same way that I would with a brush. Yet rather than simply focussing on the surface of the skin, I feel that stitch allows me to construct the flesh, building up thread to reference layers of skin, mapping out lines and contours with the direction of the stitch.

“Embroidery enables me to create a dense, indulgent and tactile cloth that I believe not only refers to surface, but to the composition of the surface. The direction and density of the stitch contribute to a rippling effect, a rising and falling, which produces an almost sculptural outcome. Depending on the light, this can create an ever-changing portrait, light and shade emphasizing and diminishing details, creating alternative portrayals, just as in life.”

We’ve seen portraiture quite a few times at the Cutting (& Stitching) Edge, and Harriet’s work elicits comparison with the work of Cayce Zavaglia. However Harriet’s faces have amplified caricature; the perspective and light emphasize the shapes and contours of the faces and revitalise interest in subjects that might otherwise be taken for granted. I like ‘em.

Connect with Harriet at her blog and visit her etsy store to buy pieces of her work.

Our chums at Urban Threads have recently launched a blog, where you can find out about all the stitchy shenanigans that they get up to. One recent project was the Crane Wife:

It’s a terrific piece of art and testimony to the effort Urban Threads are putting into the machine embroidery sector. I strongly encourage you to read the whole post to understand the fantastic creative process that led to the creation of this masterpiece.

I really like this axolotl from Squishy Things. I think he might like me, too. He’s so friendly!