Jordan Nassar - Palestinian embroidery at the ICA Boston

Lament of the Field, detail.

Recently, DH and I journeyed to the booming Seaport area of Boston to see Jordan Nassar - Fantasy and Truth at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA)  Boston, on view through January 29, 2023. 

The exhibit features embroidery made monumental.  From the wall text:

 

Jordan Nassar (b. 1985 in New York) is a multidisciplinary Palestinian-American artist who works in traditional Palestinian craft.  His embroideries, many of which he creates in collaboration with craftswomen in Ramallah, Hebron, and Bethlehem, combine regional motifs with imagined landscapes.   A self-taught artist, Nassar is know for his use of Palestinian tatreez (a form of cross-stitch embroidery), through which colors, patterns, and designs distinguish a wearer both by their origins and their social or familial status, and can signal different stages of life.   A thousands-of-years-old tradition, tatreez has strong ties to Palestinian nostalgia, nationality, and heritage.

Gallery overview.

The exhibit occupies one gallery and also features Nassar's forays into wood marquetry and glass bead manipulation, but for me it's all about the stitching, which utilizes cotton embroidery floss on cotton cloth.  The panels featuring traditional motifs are "interrupted" by stitched landscapes, through which Nassar succeeds in expanding this tradition into a modern cultural expression. The traditional panels and the landscapes play off each other as foils; each made livelier by the adjacency of the other. Each traditional panel features four analogous colors while the landscape panels introduce complementary hues and additional colors not seen elsewhere.

 

The titles of the two works are from a book of poetry, A Tear and A Smile by Lebanese-American author Gibran Khalil Gibran (1883-1931),

Song of the Flowers, 2022.

Lament of the Field, 2022.

Viewers give some idea of the scale of these panels.

 

Detail, landscape panel, Song of the Flowers.

Close-up of cross-stitching, Song of the Flowers.

The motifs in the more traditional panels have specific meanings or references but these were not identified in the exhibit. At the end of this blog I've listed some books which give more information on tatreez, which the UN has designated as an Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Detail, Song of the Flowers.

Detail, Lament of the Field.

Detail, Lament of the Field.

Detail, Lament of the Field.

By varying the color within  motifs - Nassar's signature style - curvilinear patterns can be created, as in the moon above, and its counterpart, the sun, below.

 

Detail, Song of the Flowers.

To learn more about Palestinian embroidery:

(Note - some of the books are out of print and/or hard to source.)

 

Ghnaim, Wafa. Tea and Tatreez. 

Kamel, Widad. Threads of Identity.

Skinner, Margarita. Palestinian Embroidery Motifs: A Treasury of Stitches.

Weir, Shelagh. Palestinian Embroidery.

Soft toys to stitch

Finished stuffed personalities, made by a seven-year-old.

Our grandchildren and their parents visited this summer and my granddaughter loves projects so I found this kit. My aging brain has forgotten where I found it, but it's available through Amazon and other vendors.

 

Kit comes with everything, including polyfil stuffing and a needle, and makes three stuffed toys: a unicorn, phoenix bird and yeti.  I explained the legend of the phoenix, and we found Nepal and Tibet on a world map to discuss the yeti. 

 

The well-illustrated instruction booklet is very clear. I helped start, and tie off, each seam of stitching, but otherwise grandchild worked independently. Most of the eyes and ears, etc., are adhesive, but there is a bit of additional stitching. 

 

Also extra adhesive bits allow for some personalization, as seen in the yeti in the top image, which differs from the image on the package.

Several mornings of fun.

 

Raining rainbows embroidery

Raining Rainbows design, simplified.

Time for some easy stitching. I found this free, downloadable embroidery pattern at:

https://www.shinyhappyworld.com/2016/04/its-raining-rainbows-a-free-pattern.html

I simplified the design a bit and followed the artist's suggestion to use a product called Sticky Fabri-Solvy to transfer my modified pattern to my fabric.

Simplified design on trace paper.

 

Using the single sheet feed on my photocopier, I fed in one sheet of the Fabri-Solvy and photocopied my trace paper design. Then I followed the directions on the Fabri-Solvy package - peeled off the backing sheet and stuck the design right down on my blue Essex cloth.  Essex cloth is a linen-cotton blend with a fairly open weave, so it's good for embroidery.  The layer of Fabric-Solvy did make my embroidery needle stick a bit but, for a simple running stitch, sewing through the adhesive sheet and fabric substrate was fine.

 

Light blue Essex cloth and pack of Fabri-Solvy sheets.

Fabri-Solvy, with design, adhered to cloth and in hoop.

I initially stitched the cloud outline in white, but decided that would be too low contrast with the blue fabric, so I removed that stitching and resewed with black. Much better. All the stitching done with two plies of DMC embroidery floss, by the way.

Hard to see white thread on light blue.

Cloud restitched with black, red rays stitched.

Continuous stitching started at the eyes, then the mouth and finally the outline.

All the rays stitched, but yellow and green colors too wimpy.

I also swapped my original yellow and green threads for richer colors. Once the stitching was complete, I trimmed the excess Fabri-Solvy from the design, following the package instructions.

New green and yellow colors, now finished.

Trimmed and ready to dunk in water.

Fabri-Solvy flaking off in water.

 

When immersed in warm water (no soap) the adhesive does flake off and dissolve, and I detected no tackiness after the project air-dried. Don't know if I'd use the Fabri-Solvy for something intended as an heirloom, but certainly a convenient way to transfer patterns.  Not sure yet what I will do with my Rainbows - but may simply frame it in a hoop, for display. Stay tuned.

Stitched souvenir of London

London Routemaster bus, image from Wikimedia.

 

 

 

In 1998, we enjoyed a week-long family vacation in London.  We mostly rode the Tube, rather than buses, as it was just easier to figure out the routes. 

 

After drooling over the Tana lawn at Liberty I also purchased this small souvenir - a cross-stitch kit from Textile Heritage. Well, twenty years later, I finished it!

 

Small kit by Textile Heritage.

 

The kit came with a small square of 18-count Ada cloth, embroidery thread, a needle, a stitching diagram and brief instructions. As suggested, I cut small lengths of each color and taped these next to the color key, to clarify which color went in which stitch. I also drew the center axes of the design in red pen, to center the design on the small square of cloth. As I stitched each section, I colored it in with a yellow marker. The fine mesh of the 18-count was challenging, and I don't think I'll tackle it again, although I do appreciate the detail.

Progress image.

 

Finished -  ready to mount and frame.

Modern and antique stitched cats

Detail of a group friendship quilt, from Cats on Quilts, p. 100

One of my favorite quilts books is written by quilt historian Sandi Fox - Cats on Quilts, published in 2000 by Harry N. Abrams. It's full of details of quilts featuring appliqued or embroidered felines.   It seems there a lot of overlap between cat-lovers and quilt makers.  I know from experience that no cat can resist settling on a heap of piled up fabrics.

So, for an introductory kantha stitching online workshop offered by quilter extraordinaire, Carol Anne Grotrian, I turned to this book as a source for my explorations.  Kantha stitching is a traditional process in which used saris are artfully layered and stitched into new bed covers; the artisans are women in Bangladesh and elsewhere on the Indian sub-continent. I first leaned about kantha in a workshop with Canadian artist Dorothy Caldwell.

The top  image is blurry, as it is in the book, but the stitching seems to say:

Tom, Dick and Harry

Vowed never to marry

In the Good Old Summer time

and the signature might be "Mrs. Fenton M. Smith", although it's hard to decipher.

This 1904 quilt was documented in the New York Quilt Project.

For my small project, I used two layers of unbleached muslin, scrap red fabric, a sashiko needle and sashiko thread, which is about the same weight as 6-strand embroidery floss. The solid red cat was needle-turn applique.  The stitched red cat was outlined in chain stitch, a traditional kantha technique, and the "fur" was just my mash-up of sashiko and kantha sewing.  Large running stitches, echoing the outlines of the moon and the kitties, filled the background.  Small stars are a special motif called a bhutti.  I did use a fine line chalk pencil to roughly sketch out the general direction of my stitching lines. 

The finished Cats and Moon below, photographed in raking light to show the texture created by the stitching.

My stitching, approximately 8" x 10".

The back. I didn't bother to bury the knots.

 

 

 

 I will probably back this little work with red fabric and make a small pillow or wall hanging.

A Kitty for Valentine's Day

Kitty, atop Hershey's kisses.

I stitched up a few kitties for family and friends.  Just wool felt, embroidery floss and polyfill stuffing. Very easy.

The pattern is available if you sign up for a newsletter here: 

https://swoodsonsays.com/free-cat-sewing-pattern/

I did sign up and downloaded the pattern, but enlarged it to make a kitty about 5 1/2" tall.  I also changed the eyes, as follows:

 

 

For the eyes, I used 3 strands of black embroidery floss and also 3 strands for the pink nose, which is just satin stitch.

 

To attached the face to the front, I used two strands of white floss, and a simple running stitch. Two strands, color to match the felt, are also used to whip stitch the front and back together.

 

Finally, I used the entire 6 strands of floss for the whiskers, which are just pulled through the layers and trimmed, for a 3-dimensional effect. 

 

Happy Valentine's Day!

Pandemic stitchery, or a child entertains herself

Flora the Shy Daisy.

A new company in Colorado makes delightful little kits to create your own stuffed toys,  Heron Hill Stitch Co. 

My granddaughter loves these,  cutting out the pieces and stitching her new felt friends all by herself.  Pretty impressive for a five-year-old.  It's all about the process and we don't worry too much about perfection in needlework at this time.  She's having fun, while not staring at a screen.

 

Newly stitched friends.

Fran, the optimistic frog.

Sam, the wide-awake strawberry.

 

 

These endeavors prompted me to unearth something from a storage trunk - Hootie, an owl I glued and stitched, using a kit, when I was about ten or eleven.  Hootie has somehow survived through many house moves and life cycle events, a little faded, but still beloved.

 

 

Hootie.