Plenty. Among the most consulted texts in the English language are those dictionaries of synonyms and antonyms – thesauruses. Using the most appropriate word is very important to me. My parents were well read and my sisters and I grew up with word games – the Scrabble set was very worn last time I saw it, and on sunday morning ABC radio (Australian Broadcasting Commission, modelled on the BBC) we listended to a word game program called My Word
I’ve written several times here about the hand stitch / slow stitch thing, and this post https://www.alisonschwabe.com/weblog/?p=8160 summarised my thoughts pretty well I thought, until just now. I was browsing ‘for a few minutes’ on Pinterest and this one came up in my feed along with a bunch of other images of contemporary hand stitch. It’s a lovely embroidered flower, with heaps of stemmed fly stitches and french knots and many straight stitches. Someone who found it elsewhere pinned it, but did not attibute the maker, and she just labelled it ‘slow stitch’. As there are several similar pins of hers in my feed, clearly she has a thing about the look, artistic potential and restorative benefits of all kinds of hand stitching.
But why did she just label this pic ‘slow stitch’? She was not the maker, so she probably had no idea whether the work went fast or slowly, and whether the maker was mindful at the time, meditating, listening to the radio or an audiobook, or chatting with someone while she was stitching it? Why didn’t she just say it was hand embroiderered or hand stitched ?
This little thing irritated me quite disproportionately, and I don’t blame you for seeing me as just as obsessive about hand stitch as the slow stitch fad followers whose posturings get up my nose! In my view, the old fashioned word ’embroidery’ covers it all, including the vast dictionary of stitches and embroidery styles from different cultures since the dawn of time, and some amazing favourite contemporary textile artists who work in fabric+stitch – Carolyn Nelson, Emily Barletta, Roberta Wagner, Stephanie Fujii, Dorothy Caldwell among them. And in a big project with heaps of hand stitching, whatever kind and whatever speed you’re working at, the stitching does become rhythmic, adding the calming benefits that slow stitchers so ardently extoll.
Tags: hand stitch
English
And then there are those of us who are forced to stitch slowly because of arthritis! Sometimes my stitching is a meditation in thumb pain, but I can’t give it up because I get such joy from the colors and design.
I’m in your camp on this one. The whole “slow stitch” movement hanger on-ers get under my skin as much as the early days of the “modern quilt” movement, both acting like they invented their new obsession rather than understanding the history of hand stitching and quilting and where they fit into it. As I study the work of the teachers of the slow stitch, I’ve come to understand what they are getting at and exquisitely done embroidery is not the emphasis, but the slowing down to perhaps quiet the mind. Well, I have always done every kind of hand work slowly and methodically, just my thing, and working side by side by those who work fast be it in piecing blocks, machine quilting a top or hand stitching makes me nervous and feel like I have to rush to keep up. I’m glad SOMEONE figured out how to slow these rushing makers down but the name still irritates. 🙂