Alison J. Stein
Very Curious Mind/ Under Construction
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Words

What you're looking at here is a place for my occasional casual writing.

My relationship with writing is long -- you can see my properly published articles and essays here -- and complicated. There are seasons where I feel very "writer-y" and those that I don't. So expect long pauses in updates, satisfaction certainly not guaranteed.

Experimental Embroideries

About 300 years ago when it was February I worked on a project of embroidery experiments:

This was my twist for this year’s Februllage, an annual daily collage prompt challenge which I have participated in twice before, in 2021 and 2024.

I don’t really do art challenges anymore, but this is such a good one — I always learn a lot and see such cool work from all over the world.

Fun side note: Februllage is a project of the Scandinavian Collage Museum, in Rennebu, Norway. Due to the way Instagram has (not) been working, the organizers asked people to use the location “Skamfersvingen” rather than the hashtag to see posted work. And only today, as I was writing this, did I realize this is not actually a place in Norway! As best as I can work out, it’s an idiom which means “Shame on you.” (Please correct me if I’m wrong!) I am retroactively very pleased by this— if chagrined that I just assumed a long complicated word in another language was a place name which it most definitely isn’t. How American can I get?


ANYWAY. Because I have really been focused on fiber in my studio, I didn’t want to break my stride. Besides, in fiber as in any media, I tend to work with what you could call a “collage mentality”.

So I decided that I would put my own twist on the challenge. I deemed it “Fibrullage,” and decided:

  • I would respond to each prompt using stitch plus something else I wanted to explore — a material, technique or some other process.

  • I would use what I had in my studio, i.e. not purchase anything new.

  • I didn’t have to do every prompt. Although I wasn’t going to work large, stitching is more time consuming than gluing.

By quantity, this turned out to be my lowest production of the three years I’ve participated in Februllage — I did seven of the 28 prompts. But in terms of quality and what I learned, and even with taking recency bias into account, do think it was my most successful to date.

So I do want to share my learnings in case they are as useful for your creative process as they were for mine!

Due to my own varied creative perambulations over the years—which is likely how you’ve come to read this—I know my readership has varied interests and practices. You may or may not be into fiber work or visual art. So over the next few days, I’m going to share some general creative insights from the experiment, and then some technical learnings which will primarily be of interest to fiber or mixed media art geeks.

Read on:

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