A turning point: old wooden loops and colorful threads.

11/08/2024

The other day, I was talking to my friend Sarah B. It was one of those days when we hung out at the old movie theater near Lebanon Valley College, in Annville. We went for an interactive movie. It was near Halloween, so we watched the Adams Family - Loved it! While waiting to get in and have our seats, she told me she had read my previous entry from my blog, translating paragraph by paragraph to understand what I wrote -lol. I told her she didn't have to since I already did the English version; and that even though I wrote it in Spanish, when I translated it into English, I had to make changes in the Spanish version because the English one was more detailed. Anyways, Sarah mentioned how creative I was and her admiration for my continuous desire of pursuing my dream in textiles... And that dear readers, that is the reason why I decided to sit and write this new entry.

My journey has had many milestones. But if there's something I can think of as a turning point to decide pursuing this desire for textiles, it is the death of my mum Tita. I was living in Santiago, Chile. The COVID pandemic just broke out. It was about two in the morning, and I was watching a movie, when I realized I had missed calls from my sister Luisa. I called her back: it was weird, it was urgent, IT WAS MUM! 

I remember processing what I just heard; sitting on that pre-own, grey colored, awful and expired couch my cousin, uncle and I bought for 15.000 CLP when we moved together. Later that early morning, making coffee to honor mum; and in a state of mindfulness and gratitude for all what I had achieved by then. Thinking of how much she had to do with it. It was like praying inside of me; saying thank you to her for who I was and how far I have gotten. But then after almost a year, I broke down and acknowledged her absence, her not anymore long-distance calls. All those months before, my fear and sadness were drowned by the workload that I accepted just to save money and go. Yes, I just wanted to go to Turkey desperately! But it was like God and mum herself had other plans for me, putting her old threads and loops at my service. 

Long before, I kind of started learning embroidery with her. I was about 14-15 years old, and my old friends decided not to be my friends anymore. In school I didn't have anybody to hang out with during recess time, so I asked mum to teach me embroidery to occupy my mind during that time. Unfortunately, it didn't last. I abandoned the idea very soon; and I wish I hadn't since many, many years later I'd discover a craft I'm good at, and passionate about.

In between my siblings, I think I'm the most alike to mum when it comes to craft: I love colors, I love sewing, I love painting, - I love ironing too, just like her. I loved the idea of finally learning to embroider like she did once. It was the way I could honor her in a creative and meditative way. Yes, embroidery is a sort of meditation: you need to concentrate and practice to achieve good stitching. The rush can make the threads get tangled and while it goes through the fabric, that's something you want to completely avoid. Especially in cases when the thread is thick and the fabric has a rib weaving pattern, for example. Because the weft alternates the warp yarns up and down in an interlacing way (see image A), the spaces resulting in ribbed texture are small; thus, the thick thread pushes the wharf sideways when piercing through; making the next stitching harder to achieve. Additionally, this kind of pattern gives a good transversal elasticity to the fabric. Unlike fabrics woven with a plain pattern (see image B), the stitching is more soothing because of its sturdiness.  

These both comparisons I make are experiences I have gotten with two pieces of wearables I have embroidered before. Both have the same motifs and same stitches, but the one with a rib pattern was harder to embroider while the one with a plain pattern was smoother. My primary intention when I embroidered the jacket was to make a final project -which you can check out here- for the basic stitching course I took right after coming back from Venezuela, a year later to my mother's death. With time, this idea developed more and I ended up designing a small collection of patterns for fabric, which you can see here. When embroidering the jacket, the piercing sound of each stitch made, plus the later fizzing sound produced by the thread rubbing the 100% nylon fabric because of the tension of the loop, put me in a soothing and tranquilizing mood!

Learning embroidery has led me to fully dive into the textile world: understanding how fabrics behave when they are intervened or why the weaving of a fabric and the thread thickness choice is important. For an expert in this matter, it might sound obvious, but for me it has been experimentation and clarity to my doubts, in what I always wanted to do with my career. Embroidery comes with that creativity Sarah mentioned during our movie day; and it is a treasure my mum inherited me, including her old wooden loops and colorful threads.

Thank you Hermosísima mamá!

Finished on November 28th.

Myerstown, Pennsylvania.