Stitch sketch

Something I'd been meaning to try for a while: sketching with stitches.

Thinking a lot about drawing lately, and something Monica Tap—one of my art teachers in University—taught us about: mark-making. In the overall goal of getting your idea out there, there are infinite ways of making marks. From the very direct hands-in-medium-transferred-to-surface, to an extension of your body as the tool (say, your hair dipped in paint and flung at a canvas—who would ever do such a thing?!), to increasingly indirect ways (ie. with various implements: pencils, crayons, lipstick, sharpies), to implements that need further media (brushes dipped in paint, feather quill dipped in ink, tree branch dipped in vegetable die), and so on... It clicked something in my brain that needed to be clicked, because I had defaulted to the typical pencils on paper, or paintbrushes on canvas... Through various exercises where default techniques were "banned," I learned to make marks in entirely new ways. So healthy for creativity. And fun!

I've always thought the "wrong" side of stitch-work looks so neat.

And so, since I spend most of my days defaulting to a mouse and a computer screen to make my marks, I thoroughly enjoyed making this hands-on thread drawing, and trying different ways to affect the quality of the "line": single thread vs double thread vs knot, etc. I'm eager to explore the variety of ways of mark making with needle and thread (and also different threads/yarns/ribbons onto different fabrics and materials), I'm getting excited just thinking about it!