Personal Threads: The Needlecraft Road, Guest Post by Beth Arnold (assisted by Julia Robinson Shimuzu)

It started with a skid on the low pile carpet at work, then a shaky left foot, then a slow uneven gait, my left arm no longer swinging…it was Parkinson’s.  It does not and will not define me.  My needlework defines me.  My travels define me.  My family defines me.  

Several years ago, on a weekend beach trip in southern California with two women who also have PD, we stopped at a needlework shop in Ventura where I found a kit for a glorious, red-headed counted-cross stitch Mermaid.  She came with beads and required over 40 skeins of colored cotton embroidery floss.  I bought the kit and ordered olive green 30-count linen.  I could not wait to get started.   I love going through my collection of embroidery thread that is organized by number, pulling out the ones I have and making a list of those I don’t.  I also love going to the craft store and pulling the new colors I need.  Over the years I have worked on her and she now stands at about 80% complete. 

 

Mermaid

When I told a good friend about my predicament with my mermaid she said “your mermaid is beautiful and unfinished, just like you”.  And I thought, she is right, at least about the unfinished part.  She taught me that I have more to give, more art to create where I will be inspired and energized by color and texture and flowers and my travels. 

Wild Flower

My husband was working in the Bay Area for several years while I remained in Los Angeles and I had many nights and weekends alone where my Mermaid kept me company along with other needle crafts like knitting, embroidery and sewing (both hand and machine).  That ended a few years ago and I put my mermaid and other projects aside after my husband and I bought a new home on a hill that we have decked out with interior and exterior entertainment spaces.  My favorite is our rose terrace that has over 30 rose bushes.   Sometimes I joke that I raise roses in lieu of not having children.  We also have a parterre, fruit trees and a Zen garden with topiaries.  We have a lovely view of the glen from our living area bay window.  

About a year ago I started having double vision. My doctor says it’s the PD.  One of the many odd PD symptoms.   There is nothing to be done.  My fine motor skills are also changing, making it harder to thread a needle and sew or knit or write or type when I am “off”.  This “off” period that can vary but in my case is about an hour, refers to the transition time between medication doses which I take at six different times a day.  So we go on and off, up and down, just like in sewing.  

It was startling when I realized I could no longer work on my Mermaid. Thirty count linen was just too small and I have not been able to find a comfortable magnifier stronger than the one I own.  So I started anew with a blank slate thinking of what I could make with my growing collection of tulle, felted wool, beads, fabric and metallic thread.  Starting with my tulle collection I did an internet search and learned you can singe the edge of a round piece of tulle to make flower petals.  I made a few small flowers this way and sewed them on little felt jewelry pouches.

I began thinking about how I could use the tulle in other ways. For years I have been buying up tulle remnants from fabric stores, tucking them in a drawer to my craft table.  Like with the embroidery floss, I adored the colors and the idea that something fancy could be made with them and I needed to own as many as I could find on sale. 

I have always enjoyed close up pictures of flowers, maybe from the influence of Georgia O’Keefe who I discovered in college, and ever since getting my first camera I have taken hundreds of flower close-ups from places I have traveled to such as Red Butte Gardens in Salt Lake City, Utah. It was particularly “fruitful.” On a trip to Denmark in the midd-80’s I fell in love with their brightly colored Danish Flower Thread, cross-stitched linen botanical designs.  

Yellow Embroidered Pillow 

With the grace of God, I was inspired to pull up a few of my flower photos and began piecing together the felted wool and tulle petals in small tapestries.  I needed to hold the tulle and felt in place.  I tried stabbing wool roving into both and the result was really pleasing.  I am able to use the wool roving like oil paint, mixing color, using contrasting colors. It was thrilling to find online retailers selling roving samplers. I now own over 100 colors.  I recently organized my roving using “The Secret Lives of Color” by Kassia St. Clair.    There were names I have never heard of before like “woad” (in the blue family) and “verdigris”.  I spent hours grouping and re-grouping my lovely colors into eight boxes like a rainbow. 

To help use felted wool remnants and add unique detail to my tapestries, I use small dots or beads for tiny [part of flower that looks like dots].  To make this easier I purchased a Japanese punch needle for making small wool dots.  Oh, and I also have lots of beads, purchased at General Bead in San Francisco (can you imagine two floors of colored beads)? I’m also building up my metallic thread collection

Daffodils 

My interest in needle felting goes back to 2005 when I befriended a little neighbor girl who love doing “hands-on” projects with me.   I found a kit for her to make a penguin using wool roving.   That is when I first started working with roving.  Like embroidery floss, it comes in many colors.  A few years later I stumbled on a shop called “The Wool Lady”, now sadly closed, and I got my first taste for felted wool applique. 

Tapestry 1, Daffodils

The colors, textures and designs were endless.  I became interested in Jacobean designs and made several pillow tops with intricate designs.   [photo?] I continued to make counted cross stitch pieces, looking for patterns with lots of color.  [consider photo of partially finished mermaid – cannot see to finis due to PD – caused blurry vision] Parkinson’s can affect fine motor skills so my hand-writing has become a mess unless I go super slow.  This makes embroidery and knitting difficult so I schedule my crafting that requires a steady hand during my “on” times.

Tapestry 2

My mom would be so pleased to see my latest creations. She grew up on a small farm in Buffalo, Kentucky and her mom, my Grandma Mom, moved around the south because my great grandfather was a heavy handed school teacher and kept getting fired.  Both my mom and grandma influenced my interest in crafts.  My grandma crocheted me a colorful doll blanket using remnants.  I think that may have been my first experience with fiber arts and I was certainly captured by the colors in my blanket. The blanket sits safely in my cedar chest. 

 

Grandma's Colorful Crocheted Blanket

My mom went on to be a homemaker with four of us kids, me being the oldest. My first memory of sewing is with her using her old Singer sewing machine. She made clothes for my Chatty Cathy doll. A favorite is a purple grape print with white rickrack. And my mom made most of my clothes (we wore uniforms to school).  One year my mom made red flannel pajamas (3 girls and 1 boy) for each of us.  Can you imagine all that red flannel?!! Her work was beautifully done and immaculate.

Red Flannel Pyjamas

My mom taught me to sew on her Singer and I made rudimentary attempts at making doll clothes.  As a girl scout I learned about embroidery and our troop leader taught us how to knit using sharpened No. 2 pencils for needles!

Pink Dress

In high school I took   Home Economics and continued honing my sewing skills. By the time I started college, I was able to make blouses, dresses and skirts.   My freshman year I took a life-drawing class.  I will never forget my embarrassment seeing a stark naked man for the first time.  The model at one point turned his seat so he faced me and then took a pose where he pointed directly at me!  

I took art history classes in additional to business administration and planned to become a CPA.  And once out of college I headed to Texas to begin my career in accounting and finance.  

Having little money, I made most of my clothes including blazers and skirts and blouses.  After passing the CPA exam I had more free time and that afforded me visits to art museums and galleries which I had loved since my teens when my dad introduced them to me on a family trip to NYC. Over the years I took various painting classes.  I loved oil painting and mixing and merging colors.  As I progressed in my career over the years I spent less time sewing my own clothes and painting (oils are pretty messy and having proper space and light became an issue.) But I always planned to come back to oil painting.

To satisfy my creative leanings I continued to knit, sew, embroider over the years.  I have a habit of not finishing my knitting and embroidery projects. Fortunately, our new home has a small basement and a loft in the garage, affording me space to safely store my work.  I sometimes wonder how many hours were consumed while I thought about work problems that needed solving or family issues or what to fix for dinner. I always planned on returning to my projects when I retired.   

Beth Arnold with her friend Julia
who helped type out her story

Life is a wonderful journey.  My niece recently told me she wants to learn to knit.  And she inherited mom’s old singer sewing machine. I look forward to showing her my mermaid and other projects.  Maybe she will be interested in my tapestries too. It’s comforting to know during these pandemic times with so many options and distractions to know that some of life’s basics matter.  Sewing, knitting, embroidery live on.

I am 62 years old (and) live in Los Angeles (I) was diagnosed with Parkinson’s over 10 years ago. (I) love color love art love wildflowers especially thistle. I’ve started making small tapestries using some of my favorite media: tool, wool, beads, metallic thread here is a couple of examples Based on some of my own photographs. (this is how Beth introduced herself to me via email. Parkinson's makes it hard for her to type, so I have left the typos intact. Her friend Julia assisted in  putting together this story, which took quite a while.

Beth Arnold is a retired chief financial officer who has been battling Parkinson’s disease since 2009, when she was diagnosed, at the age of 50. Her lifelong passion for color has been satisfied by working with embroidery, knitting, oil painting and most recently tapestries where she combines felted wool, wool roving, beads and metallic thread to make colorful tapestries inspired by her own botanical photographs taken during her travels. 

The Universal Language of Stitching Art - A tool in an experimental field at the crossroads of art, philosophy and care

In the course of a conversation with Gopika Nath about philosophy of stitching, I came to examine some words around philosophy of stitching.

English requires three words, “ folds”, “ pleats “ and “ creases “ to describe three different “ states of the matter”, where French use only one “pli”, to describe the same situations. Well, not exactly, “crease “is “faux pli”, and other subtle reasons of sentence construction that would be fastidious to mention here.

This question has been haunting for long in my textile art practice.  Not only regarding words, but real cloth. Words “unfold” into a mental space, where textile art practice evolves in the real 3D world.  And I’m not naively re-discovering here an elusive “neat simplicity of things as they are”, opposed to the space of “evil concepts”.

The world of stitching and fibre arts is of cultural representations, where teaching and learning, human transmissions, education, knowledge, come along with models and documentation. Yet how is it that stitching, for being culturally complex, speaks with equal universality to human hearts?

The holistic approach of fibre arts

We may have an answer. It’s because stitching, with other textile art techniques uses the body as a tool for mediating a self-analysis operated by the mind.

The repetitive way some tasks are performed creates a soft trance that connect to yourself, creating this “temporal bubble“where fibre artists, as most crafters, find themselves in.  The body is not used as in a sports activity but, by involving the eye, the hand, and sometimes the legs, in small scale coordination, together with brain in a highly complex mix.

It re-enacts the links you used to solicit when you were, as a child, constructing your representation of the world, and the ways to interact with it. Understanding a weaving pattern is a demanding task, partly done by the body. And this task of constructing an inner representation of the world is the same as building yourself up and together;

The ability to transport you into a world where you can walk again in the path of this building process makes stitching a precious tool for healing, using the mind in spiritual ways, to make, not intellectual virtual constructions, but concrete inner connections that are building or rebuilding yourself.

It also explains why it’s “above” tongues: because it’s functioning upon mechanisms that are put in place while learning of language during childhood.   

First mechanisms of language acquisition start very early and involve other “proto-representational” schemes that could be qualified as “artistic”, a convenient, but relevant way to describe how we feel when art speaks this language of harmony we all know, without using words.

This primary language is universal. It helps us to walk along the path between us and other people, and helps to find harmony inside our self and with others. 

 

A paradise you could reach with your hand
Of course, as with all practices that deal with human, things are not that easy. It’s not because you find a problem that this problem is solved. Seeing a problem is only a condition sine qua non to see a solution. And even once you think of a solution, a lot of work remains to be made, because of circumstances that slow the healing process.

It might takes years or be frustrating. Looking back over yesterday, you are happy discovering its better today, but no warranty to be any better tomorrow etc.

Stitching is not a magical recipe for happiness, you could use by itself, excluding other activities and other people. At the opposite, textile art connects you to other people, helps you find these you resonate better with, or to practice other activities. It might help realize how cooking, dyeing, dancing with others can be wonderful.

It takes a bunch of people to breed sheep, grow linen, dye, spin, weave, sew, stitch, patch. Textile art is wonderful at making you feel how important you are in a group of humans motivated to create beautiful things.

Could this energy, a useful resource for a life enlightened by jubilation, be used more and better than it is now?

We know we don’t have answers to every question. We are not in the making of a technical manual, but in human relationship. Each person is unique, a case at this moment, and other technicians of education, care, psychology, and very widely of philosophical, spiritual and mental life are welcome to examine the case.

Once these precautions taken, we may work out how the practice of textile art participates in the development of concrete experiences aimed at a better understanding for new contributions in education, relations with others of the human being, in the physical, intellectual, spiritual and social aspects.

 

Stitching, a rooted knowledge
We know see how the idea comes to mind that an artist could make other people benefit from this practice artists accompany other people on the path, turning into a practitioner who would help  the positive effects to happen during the walk, by walking along and teaching the technique.

We all know this is already widely working with a true success in every town every day around the world, but the links between teaching, care, technique, and self-awareness are not always clearly defined. In fact, all nuances of the pallet can be found through various kinds of “workshops” in general. 

As long as it works, everything is fine, and we would like to do some research in the field, avoid  transforming a charming wild garden into a boring park, but see if we could set up a small glass-house somewhere.

In the experimental field, the experimental tool requires experimental operators. Now if you look, an artist repeatedly travels not only between herself and the world, but also between innovation and mastered techniques, her crafting know-how.

A release (of problems, question) has to be operated from a base. And this base is made of traditional know-how that artists inherited, built and developed over centuries into a “personal style”. All this in one word: “culture”. While Gopika has been “described as a contemporary artist using traditional embroidery as a medium”, we see her, at the same time, searching for the roots and story of embroidery.

While there is nothing more contemporary than “care “, even in art, there is nothing more necessary to contemporary art than technical tradition.

It’s a move we share at our workshop, L’Atelier de Minuit. While Lydie deepens her knowledge of traditional embroidery, using cloth with a past, dyed with vegetal colours, and stitching following historical models, Guillaume explores the bridges between this practice and contemporary trends of art.

 

Art, care, culture, civilization

Folding and unfolding, to pleat or to crease, linking, joining, binding through a repository of terms that “ point to “ hand making, the art of stitching goes straight from the heart of matter to the soul, and connects us to ourselves and others like a universal language.

A saying: “Le travail des mains libère l’esprit”, could be translated into “the work of hands sets the mind free”, invites us to re-consider how traditional embroidery culture has become part of contemporary art.  The times we had to convince, that “despite using thread, yes, it’s art indeed“, are over. Shift happens.

Leaving the 20th century “star system” of art, a contemporary approach focuses on care, the one we take for each other, beginning with one self.

Rooted in centuries of tradition, stitching and other fibre arts are more vivid than ever, and able to enlighten how the brain, the mind, the heart and the soul collaborate into the one big thing that humanity is.

Practice of fibre arts is full of joy and peace. We would like to help young textile artists gain technique, know-how, as well as training and self confidence they need to extend this as a helpful tool, to fulfil mission of caring among and for others.

 

 

 Guillame Bur is a textile artist, which he says is mostly about spoiling silk and linen pieces. He is also a philosopher. Together with Lydie Arnould, he runs L’Atelier de Minuit, an organization dedicated to promote textile arts.             

      

                            www.atelierdeminuit.com