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.
no subject
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.