Poetry Complement: Sampler

[jenn_calaelen]

Hi! I'm Jenn (or Jenn_Calaelen)

jjhunter asked me to post about the sampler I made for ariestess's story and poetry for the ladiesbigbang. (Also, warning that this post and the sampler contain spoilers for her work).
So, this is the sampler:

Link to her story
There are warning in the story info at the top. As I use her poems in the sampler it also contains the themes of self harm and many forms of cruelty.













Now onto the questions :

Why a sampler?

I've been doing crossstitch, backstitch, and blackwork embroidery for a few years, but mostly working from books and commercial patterns. I had adapted some to suit what I was doing (eg changing colours, adding and removing borders. I had been thinking for a while about trying to make a fannish sampler of some sort.
Also, I'm not an artist - I can't draw, make graphics or anything like that - but embroidery allows me to make visually pretty and creative things.

What elements/aspects of how you implemented it do you find particularly meaningful? How did you decide which poems to include?

I don't know how familiar you all are will the challenge, but for Ladiesbb after first drafts are due a list of projects is put out for complements in any other form. I was looking through the list of projects, mostly through curiosity to see what everyone was creating, and saw ariestess's project: Babylon 5 - Talia and Ivanova, and poetry... So this is one of my favourite fandoms and characters that I love. I thought that maybe I could make a sampler of it. I waited to see if someone else would sign up for it, but started thinking about ideas. Thinking of how I could make relevant icons and copying out and adapting alphabets.
Then (name) sent me a copy of the poetry (and the story so far). I read through it, and realised that what I had been thinking of doing was far too complicated, cluttered, to suit her poems. (Also, I had the total wow at reading her work)
So I started setting out the poems (I was using a cross-stitch program - kxstitch). She had clearly taken a stylistic decision not to use capital letters, so I preserved that. I started setting out each of these, in order, thinking that I would then pick a few to put on the sampler.
While doing this, I started to pick out that the general theme was Talia's escape from Psi Corps. So checked out the Psi Corps badges again, then produced the icons at the top, then worked out the broken ones for the bottom, (although I think that they turned out not to be quite one broken one for the bottom).
It felt to me as if the poems were somewhere between separate poems and verses of a longer poem. Therefore I wanted to try and delineate them somewhat, but preserving the order. Also, one column would seem too long, but then I had to work out, which way to put the verse - across or down? Eventually I worked out that down made more sense - so I inserted the extra Psi at the top, in the hope of helping to make it clear that the columns were more separated from each other.
At this stage I was still not sure how many poems I was going to embroider. However, the more I looked at them, the harder it was to choose. Each verse seemed important, and setting up fort he later ones.
I knew it needed a border, but it did not need to be complicated - so as not to distract from the words. I picked a simple braid for that reason. The Psi Corps badges are usually bronzy-gold in the show, and the separate logos black. For the sake of simplicity, I made to logos and frames black (using gold thread as well for the logos to make them stand out). Yellow seemed to work for the bronze/gold and because it is a colour I associate with Talia. I chose colour changing thread to add a little variety - I thought that it would not be too much.

How much did you talk about the design, etc. with the poet before or during creating the sampler?

I didn't actually. There wasn't a lot of time, and I felt very shy about it as I had never done something like this before. Therefore I just got on with it and sent her pictures of the final result... I was very relieved to hear back from her that she liked it.

How might the setting of the sampler vs. the computer screen/context of the fic change how people approach the poems?

I'm not really sure - this is possibly a question that any of you reading this could answer better than me.
Taking the poems out of the surrounding story, they still seem to have a lot of emotional impact, but without the surroundings there is less explanation. The outline of the story is still there, it leaves many more questions.
 

All the pictures of this are online here Apologies for the quality of the pictures - I had a lot of trouble trying to get the sampler to show up properly.

I hope this is interesting - I'm happy to try and answer any questions.

Comments

[lilmoka]

WOW. Just... WOW. This is so amazing *____*

[jenn_calaelen]

Thank you! :)

[ariestess]

I am still so damned thrilled that you made this sampler for me. We are working out how we're going to frame it, so it can get hung up in the home office.

[jenn_calaelen]

Thank you! I am so happy you like it (and that it has got there safely).

[ariestess]

I adore it. Just need to get it mounted and framed so I can hang it on the wall.

[jjhunter]

I'll comment again with more detailed feedback & questions later, but just wanted to say that this so, so cool - a sampler of both your skill and ariestess' epic.

[jjhunter]

Okay - I'm just going to throw my thoughts down on the page, or I'll stay stuck at lilmoka's stage. (Your sampler is very WOW-worthy.)

I really like the use of color-changing thread - I think it adds a more natural quality the visual field as a whole, adding interest and avoiding the stiffness of strict adherence to a single color. (If the braids were just straight yellow I think they + badge would scream military at me.)

Envisioning the text without the braid - it would overwhelming, jumbled, flooding out. With the braid, the effect is one of tight control, each chunk of raw emotion in its slot.

I love love love the closeup with which you begin this post. There's something about 'dominant bitch' being stitched in such beautifully clear writing and juxtaposed against that carefully rendered braid, the cognitive dissonance between the trope of the quiet, demure, refined woman embroidering something wholesome and the blunt language, the despair being expressed...it's as if someone sewed the thoughts she couldn't say into dictates for herself to remember. (It also reminds me of my friend M- with leukemia, who has a cheery light blue roughly cross-stitched 'fuck cancer' hanging framed on her wall.)

So how is this different than reading computer text on the screen? There's a cadence and a pace suggested by how the shapes of the letters come to be on the surface where you read them - just think of how expressive ink-brush calligraphy can be, the difference between heavily inked, loose strokes and thin, highly ornamented characters with extra loops and swirls. Our understanding of how the words physically came to be affects the internal pacing we assign to them as we read.

[jenn_calaelen]

Thank you! It is really interesting to see what you think about it.

[alee_grrl]

I haven't had a chance to go and read the full story and poems that this work complements, but I wanted to let you know how beautiful I though your sample was. The simple design draws the focus to the words, and the script of the words drew my eye onward to the next. Having it done in sections was nice. I felt like I was getting the highlights of emotion and plot of the main work, like a good movie trailer. In this case the sample completes the work by enticing new readers in. "See this lovely thing here. What to know where it comes from? Well follow me..." We often think of complements as being the end of a work, but the can be beginnings and middles as well. I hope that this makes some sense. I'm about to head to bed, and one never knows how coherent one is at that point.

Thank you for sharing this lovely work.

[jenn_calaelen]

Thank you! What you say about it working as a trailer is really interesting - I had thought about it having spoilers, but I suppose that is also true of trailers.