This is the second embroidery I worked on in chronological order. Since I’m not disciplined enough to stick to one project at a time, I alternated it with several others that I’ll talk about later.
The beginning is always tactile and olfactory. I open the drawer of vintage linens I’ve collected here and there and pick the fabric that attracts me most in that moment. In this case, it was a towel a little over one and a half meters by seventy centimeters. Since I’m still new to embroidery, it would have been wiser to choose a smaller piece of fabric. Would have been.
I spread the fabric on a hard surface or on the bed and sketch something on it. At first, I used a special plastic marker made for this kind of work. It left a blue-green line that disappeared when the fabric was washed. I quickly replaced it with a soft pencil, since I couldn’t bring myself to buy and use something so polluting.
Once the drawing more or less satisfies me, I mount the fabric on a large round wooden hoop, stretching it as little as possible so the lines don’t warp. Then, with a needle — I always embroider by hand — I carefully trace over the pencil lines. It takes patience and endless hours. More than once, after an hour of work, I’ve unraveled everything and started over because I didn’t like how a curve came out or some tiny detail that probably only I could see.
The previous piece of the same size took me about eight months to complete. I don’t have much experience yet and I’m still unsure about my process. I may even go back and rework parts of it.
As for materials, at first I used the regular cotton skeins sold in sewing shops. After a few projects, I realized the threads were too fuzzy and unruly, lacking compactness. So I tried regular sewing thread, but in Italy it only comes wound on plastic spools. The cotton is almost certainly GMO, and the dyes are definitely not eco-friendly. After my whole journey of awareness with Il Pasto Nudo, these compromises feel unacceptable.
That’s when I found organic cotton thread on Etsy, dyed with natural colors and wound on wooden spools. Sadly, it doesn’t exist in Italy (or at least I haven’t found it) and has to come from Germany. But it works perfectly. The threads are smooth and compact, and they withstand the machine washes I sometimes need to do to remove excess pencil from the fabric.
I can hardly describe the feeling I get when I face a white piece of fabric. It feels so organic—in the Cronenberg sense of the word. Passing a needle through it changes its surface and structure, while leaving it intact and free to return to its original state. Like a surgical operation without blood or risk. The threads running across the fabric look like veins shimmering beneath the skin.
For now, this is how I move forward. Every day I carve out anywhere from half an hour to two hours to work. Most of the time, I battle with the inner voices telling me I’m ridiculous, that embroidery is meaningless, that I’m wasting precious time I should use for work that brings money. Those voices echo judgments I once heard from people I admired deeply, at a time when I was too young to have my own opinion or defend it.
In the end, it’s right to face and wrestle with our monsters rather than deny them, only to find them later looming like a hungry T-rex. Sooner or later, as I keep turning them over in my hands, I’ll find a weak spot, a way out that leaves me stronger. And they say art is cathartic.
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