I suffered from Long and short-stitch sickness, which is that lacerating desire to immerse oneself in colour, which comes on if we have not done it for too long. In November I was managing a class in attendance on Long and short stitch and envied every hand intent on embroidery.

Under the pretext of showing the movement, I would steal the looms.

In the car, on the morning of the second day, gazing at the now golden birch trees, shivering with cold, I had decided that I would rearrange all my convictions about Long and short stitch, even dust off old notes on colour theory and make sense of my personal experiences. That I would also finally give visibility to some drawings that were at least a couple of years old by then: like all children of that age, they were beginning to overwhelm me with reminders and torrents of words, forcing me to stop caring about what I was doing, and give attention only to them.

To do things right, I thought of a new e-book of drawings and a live online course.

The drawings had come into being a long time ago. I had coloured them in watercolour, when I was trying to see if I was capable. I wasn’t, but by some strange astral conjunction they hadn’t turned out badly. But me publishing something about Long ans short stitch seemed strange to me. I only take courage today because it is only right to finish what one has started and also because I needed a streamlined tool for courses, in the form of a handout.

At the origin of this alphabet is a photograph, from which I stole the flower profile, colours and colour distribution pattern.

With the course, the intention is to unhinge the three false beliefs about stitch painting, which circulate handed down from mouth to mouth:

  • Technique is difficult
  • You need a sense of colour to work Long and short stitch
  • Long and short stitch is ‘heavy’ and not very modern.

On the first two points I have a host of serious and well-founded convictions in my pocket. On the third, we enter a field of the subjective that is more difficult to argue and someone might comment, rightly so, that in his opinion my letter is heavy and, if not vintage, unusable for his own personal concept of modernity. I would argue that there is a boundless universe of modern subjects and that the materials we have at our disposal today (including a very juicy colour chart) allow us to embroider subjects that are more slender and decorative than those proposed here, but that this was for me to go through all the technical difficulties and that, in fact, perhaps even I would not use it for domestic decorative purposes. For me it was a great exercise, gladdened by an intensity of colour that gets into your bones.

More in the next post! See you soon!