Smocking

If there was one thing I learned during Explored Stitch with Mary, (actually I learned a lot) it was that I loooooove smocking; smocking is when fabric is pleated and then embroidered on top of to create elasticity without elastic. The modern, industrial equivalent is pleating the fabric then sewing elastic onto the pleats.
For my final assignment I decided to take smocking, which historically was used on clothing, and use it to sculpt a form, rather than letting the smocking conform to a body. I used linen (the fabric of choice for a serf's smock) and created a giraffe.

Another Portrait

In case you were wondering what my mom looked like in the 90's when she still had that perm, this is it!
This was a piece based off the idea of the traditional Victorian Sampler for Explored Stitch, and since we had learned so many different stitches I was thinking that they were a lot like an alphabet and made a code. Then I took a sketch I had done, gridded it out, and made it into a phrase using the code I had made.

Kick it

This assignment (Concepts I yet again) (from a long time ago yet again) involved designing an ad for a newspaper. We weren't supposed to create a finished piece, but a refined sketch for whatever we were advertising. I chose to do a cross-stitched Converse ad with the slogan "Kick It Old School" cause, you know...old people do stuff like cross stitch....

Peace and War

These pieces are from the first assignment I received in Concepts 1, to do a cover and two spot illustrations for the New York Times book review of 'Peace and War,' which was a review of Jonathan Franzen's newest novel, "Freedom."
Now I'm moving into the last two weeks of the semester so it'll be super busy for me and means I won't be able to sleep much at all :(

Queens of the Stone Age

Today I would like to say: "Lol what are updates"

I am very busy with the exciting and confusing process of study abroad paperwork!

Anyway, for Illustration Concepts I, our most recent assignment was to redesign an album cover. I chose the album 'Songs for the Deaf' by Queens of the Stone Age, mostly because I found the original cover really boring and only reflective of the song "Go With the Flow," which I think is kind of an outlier in their music.

For this album QOTSA had DJs create fake radio noise to simulate the drive to Joshua Tree, and it's included in the beginning and ends of a lot of songs, hence the radio. And frankly I find their music creepy and a bit sinister, so mosquitoes seemed like appropriate imagery. And I realized this after, but they chose their name to be the "Queens" rather than the "Kings" because king would have been to macho- and their music is rock for men and women. So I feel like the parts of the cover that I embroidered fit pretty well conceptually.

Lazier than you could ever imagine

I have a penchant for large-scale stuffed animals. I made the rat in the spring of my freshman year at MICA and the snake in the spring of sophomore. I think I could potentially have crawled inside the rat before it was stuffed, that's how big it is. Anyway these are just rephotographed because when I first did the photos were AWFUL.

And the knives are pattern-made from actual knives; it was a pretty useful exercise from Intro to Fibers although I want to figure out a system (or just learn one in general) for making a pattern from my head.

I am SEW lazy, get it?

These are some of the embroideries that I did over the last school year that I just forgot to post. The embroidery portraits are from my Intro to Fibers class last fall- the articles of clothing (a t-shirt and a cummerbund, in case you couldn't tell) belonged to each of the subjects. The t-shirt one is of my dad (he was and is so 70s) and the cummerbund is of my late "Grampa" Rose.

The rainbow one from a set of three illustrations from my Illustration II class. We had to have an image illustrating a certain idea and each image had to include a dog, a broom, and a radio tower. This one is "harmony" cause don't they all look so sickeningly happy? I sure wish I were that happy! This was the only embroidered one of the set because embroidery takes "sew" long.