Recently we had a workshop presented by Yulia Makeyeva on embroidery, in which she fist taught us various stitching methods such as the running stitch, back stitch and satin stitch. Yulia is herself an artist who combines the medium of needlework ad photography in order to create her pieces of work.
We did this by practicing first on a piece of paper and following the pattern given, then drawing a simple design of our own on a piece of fabric and using the skills just learnt to attempt to create an embroidered image. This allowed for a simple introduction to embroidery and an opportunity to develop these skills with our next task. Once we had gotten used to the different stitches, we then went around the room and collected pieces of material from the ‘People make Jersey’ exhibition at Jersey museum, that was donated to the school. With this we aimed to collect images, words and letters that told a story, potentially of migration. When collecting material, I aimed to gather pieces that linked to French migration in Jersey, such as images of well known French migrants in jersey and passages from the display that described the nature of work these French migrants moved to Jersey for. In addition, I also made sure to use red and blue thread with white frayed material for a border in order to incorporate the colours of the French flag. As well as learning how to embroider, we also got a chance to look at other artist that use thread or a type of needlework in their pieces, by looking through some of the books Yulia brought along.
When producing our pieces of embroidery we made sure to take photos during various stages of our work. This is as, after our multiple workshops we used these images to create short animation type GIFS. We did this using Photoshop: first layering all our images on top of one another, aligning them the best we could, opening a timeline from the Window drop down menu, selecting create frame animation, then on the drop down menu choosing to make frames from layers, selecting forever on the timeline and finally exporting it at the size of 720 by 720 pixels. Here I created two GIFS sowing different parts of my embroidery process, with the first displaying the sewing on of the white border and text, using a running and back stitch, and the second showing some of the extra satin stitching I used to fill in parts of the text.
