Video Transcript:

Welcome to the stitch explorer! This workshop is all about expanding and deepening our creativity through stepping out of what we know and expect - and getting a little more playful. I want you to consider bringing a bit of improvisation into your experience - meaning adding an element of the unplanned, allowing certain experiences to be spontaneous. so how does this happen? What does this mean?

Imagine learning to dance… And you’re taught to do so by following exact steps. Like for the first time ever, as a child, instead of just learning to move your body, if you learned the precise steps that you’re supposed to do before even experiencing the movement of your body.

That’s how so many of us first experience many different forms of art. Step-by-step, instead of experiencing the materials before hand. Exploring the materials and understanding their nature takes a backseat to learning what has already been established, what others before us have already discovered.

At this point, there’s a chance you’ve probably learned how to create many different stitches, but have you spent much time just playing around with the materials? Imagine learning to stitch by being given a piece of fabric, a needle, and a pile of threads. The amount of acts that you would go through to figure out how to make this work out. The amount of variations on this, outside of what we currently know as specific stages, combining them as you create these acts.

That’s what improvisational Stitching is all about.

You’re responding to your own curiosity as you move forward, or maybe responding to the previous stitches as you look back.

We want to bring the needle to our fabric as though it’s the first time we’ve experienced the stitches. Perfecting them is more than just not the point, perfecting them is the exact opposite the antithesis of what we’re trying to create here.

When we’re working with Stitches improvisationaly, we want to dissect them. We want to break them. We want to move through what they thought they were, and do something entirely different.

This is more than just creative, this is transformational. It’s therapeutic. It brings us into a whole new relationship with the way that the things we create move, through the way that our body moves.

For example, lets take this running stitch, and start to reconsider how it “should be” - going haphazardly from side to side… or maybe changing the length of the stitch, running back over itself… what else can the simple in out act of the running stitch be?

Or the backstitch… if I was to jump back and forth between two different lines of backstitching, all of the sudden I turn the fabric over, and… it’s a whole new stitch, this is the herringbone stitch by the way.

I could also use the concept of the backstitch, but not reach all the way back, or not go all the way forward, or not stay in a straight line at all.

I encourage you to consider where one type of stitch ends and another begins… can you discover new applications for stitches you already know? merge two types of stitches together? invent new stitches?