(This is gonna be a long one, so hang in there.)
This project started out as a flight of fancy for our editor- get an illustrator to use thread to create images and infographics about poverty, the topic of the spring Archways cover story.
Surprise—couldn’t find one.
Take this puppy on myself? With thread? Fabric seemed a little easier to manipulate than thread- so I proposed that line of thought. Ok. Then the cover story was axed, taken over by another author, shortened by half and given to me 2 weeks after the design deadline. I also am not an expert sewer, quilter, embroiderer, etc. Ack!
Luckily, I had a crack team of 2 other crafty designers (Natalie and Krista) who were working ahead with me, preparing for the crappiest embroidery project of a lifetime. You know, on purpose. That was the look. Well-worn and whatnot.
Anyway, here’s how it went:
Fabric. We gathered stuff from store remnants and quilt squares, co-worker stashes and blown-out jeans. I stewed tea for days and had a rack in the kitchen drying stained fabric for a solid week. I even did up the embroidery floss, leaving on the labels in some cases so there was uneven color across the thread.
Sketches. While things were drying, we got to sketching our images. The cover image was the US map, so that was just an internet look-up and printout. There were 2 interior images, 1 that was a comparison of a neat little house with an apartment complex/housing project and the other was a kid getting food put in their backpack, highlighting a food donation program in the city.
We split up responsibilities, and then pulled in finished scans of the sketches into the layout to make adjustments before any fabric was cut. From there we could scan fabric swatches and pull those into the sketches. Then we planned out what fabric went where to make sure there was a general scheme throughout the pages.
Pattern. Like making a dress (or so I hear) we cut out printouts of the sketches and pinned the chunks to scraps of the appropriate fabric we were using. From there we used a fabric glue to lightly glue down the fabric bits to a stiff cross stitch backing. We found out the combo of glue and backing made for a difficult sewing medium, so we tried to keep things “light”.
Stitches. So I’m no expert and I didn’t want this stuff to look like museum pieces. The problem was, Natalie is a bit of an embroidery master and I needed to pull her back. We stuck to simple stitches and even taught each other new ones-which I think helped make these look novice. I even learned one by looking online. Once we chose the stitches to use, we took printouts of the layouts and drew stitch patterns on them indicating placement and sometimes color. We sometimes used hoops for the embroidery process and an iron if the hoops messed up an area when we needed to move them.
Photos. Things change. Nothing could be more true about a project whose quality is expected to be charming but sometimes questionable and 3 different people working with a medium that can morph around. So we photographed it up to see the final product in layout. We were hoping our camera could capture the detail of threadwork we put in, but it could not. Also we are not professional photographers.
We caved and got on the horn with
Lane Hickenbottom. We took a trip and meticulously soft styled the heck out of the loose threads and wonky fabric and came up with some nice photos. Which I then burned out and lightened up to make text more legible and images look more old and crappy.
