Progress! Slow going, but progress all the same.

I've been moving the hoop down and down before moving across. You will notice in the last picture the will is placed strangely. It's because looking back on it the i and two ls were way too far apart so i resketched them and just added them like this.

Things would go a lot faster if I did this regularly in the evening, but we'll see. The embroidery itself doesn't take that long it's just because of the huge breaks I take in between them lol.

You can hardly see the change in purple! I'm glad.

I'm still alive!

I've been having a Time of it lately. Not to be Personal on an art blog but the short of it is I have some mental health problems.

But it's back to this!

I've been wondering recently whether I should go over these letters when they're done and do a black outline as well to make sure it all stands out. Opinions on this are welcome.

Purple thread inconsistencies

Welcome to another episode of "You didn't plan this and it's coming back to bite you in the ass"

I didn't have enough purple thread! The purple thread I did have, I have no idea what brand it was! I bought it in a hoard of threads a charity shop had vastly undervalued. There is no DMC equivalent. So after just standing in the Hobbycraft cross stitch aisle just like thinking about life and why I'm alive I picked the nearest equivalent

Reuse ur plastic bobbins with new colours.

I can already see the colour is different and I've only done one letter. So if you see the final piece and think "that top left hand corner is darker than the rest of it" please be gentle

I'm back again. I took a break to be sad / ill / play a lot of Fire Emblem and also getting into university like an absolute legend.

Also realised how much I have no idea how much time this is going to take to produce and it makes me nervous.

The fountain's no the winter, ice in a sight to see. I to be. I hope to many of us, but, commemo

I'm speeding up. I honestly felt like I was going so fast today, but I've got about 90 words left. I did the "the winter" and the "n" in the no before I realised that was past the boundaries of the hoop. Before then I've been averaging about 5 words a day, so two words, bro, we're on business now.

Adding the pansy

I had initially planned to add the pansy design the night I’d finished doing the text, because I want to get everything done, but turns out green is really fucking hard to trace through and I couldn’t really see the flower with just the artificial room lights and I needed - alas - sunlight. I got really upset at that because I have very big emotions and I nearly cried but I didn’t because I started T like four months ago and it has taken away my ability to cry which is a great relief because I get a lot more done.

This is the pansy design I drew. I do designs on graph paper for some reason or another it isn’t exact and I use it mostly for the cross stitch I never do. If you’re thinking “That looks vague” you’d be about right. Is that point in the middle a petal or a leaf? I’m just gunna fuckin vibe it when I get there honestly.

Here’s the exact same design again but on the flag where it’s supposed to be! It’s on the green stripe, it doesn’t look like it because my phone is homophobic and doesn’t know how to translate colours when I take pictures of a rainbow. I also lost the blue pen I was using when I did my text, and I have NO IDEA how I lost it because I put it down like 12 hours before then and then I just fucking lost it again? And I can’t find it again and it’s slightly upsetting.

The pansies are part of the one (1) practice embroidery I did before I decided “fuck it” and it was my first time attempting blending with long/short stitch.

This was my practice piece. The pansies looked like... really sparse and unfriendly here which is why I made them bosom buddies in my actual design, it makes it look warmer I think? Or maybe I’m projecting onto flowers.

A quick note upon the flower symbolism: If I wanted to be pretentious, I would say that putting the pansies on there is a reclamation of when pansy was used as an insult to gay people, and I guess that is true to some extent. I was considering also putting other flowers, and I considered putting the green carnation á la Oscar Wilde but I (Spoiler) don’t have any Oscar Wilde quotes in the 13 that I’ve chosen. I did read half of Dorian Gray once but it was during my years of being absolutely batshit so I don’t remember much. Maybe if I have space at the end and I’ve read Dorian Gray (which I am going to read this year) I’ll place it on there then.

It has begun. The first word down, 93 left to go.

I chose this nice purple instead of black because I have about 3 spools of black cotton left as oppose to the purple 10 and I really don't wanna make the 45 minute drive to the nearest store that sells DMC. Also purple is the colour I correlate to Angels in America, with it being the colour of the script book I own from the NT's production.

I was going to put the pansy pattern down but the green is really hard to see through so I need daylight to put it on.

Starting the project

Today’s the day, 18/1/20. I’ve been considering doing something about starting the project for a long, long time, and I decided Fuck it, today is when it’s going to happen, I’m going to start my project. 

I started by stretching the flag out on the floor. I am a short person, I am 5ft2 and the flag is about the same length I am. I was finding it really hard to stretch it out because of that and landed on an excellent flag laying technique which I will share: I put my feet on one end, my hands down on the other end of the flag with it scrunched up in the middle, very á la Downward Dog, and then I slowly push my hands forward until I’m down into a plank, and the flag is perfectly stretched out. It improves my core and it gets the flag flat, bonus.

I ummed and ahhed about how on earth I was going to do this for a long time. I was anxious about just going straight onto the flag, and at first, I wanted to plan out like, the whole flag. Like do a straight-up full-scale plan with everything to put on it, and then transfer the plan onto the flag. But after attempting to tape together enough graph paper to cover the flag and stopping after four, I decided that was dumb, and I didn’t do that. So I just decided I was gunna start in the centre and work my way out from there. 

And I got bored planning things out. So I printed out the text for the first passage and I placed it under the flag to trace it out.

Oh boy. Oh fuck. That took ages. It took at least four hours, but being more realistic it was closer to five or six. I started when the sun was still in the sky and it was dark by the time I finished. I’ve had a sinus infection that’s kind of been fucking with my vision anyway but oh lord, I thought I was going to die. I finished the text and I didn’t even draw the pansies at the bottom, but I’m going to do that now. 

I have a hand tremor which means when I take pictures it looks like I took it on a phone from the 90s so I can only apologise to that. This is a picture I took right after I finished it, and looking at it now I can already see that the text is a little bit wonky but honestly fuck it it’s hand embroidery it’s allowed to be a little bit shitty. While I was doing it all I could think was “Oh fuck it’s gunna be too big oh fuck oh fuck”.

The passage for this part of the flag is from Tony Kushner’s epic play Angels in America:

For ages (10 minutes) I sat there, thinking “should I remove the first half?” because it’s not strictly relevant, but then I decided you know what, no, I’m not going to cut it out. And then I regretted it while I was doing at it, but when I plank stretched it out, it was alright again.

Here’s a slightly better picture of it when I folded up in order to not look at it, and a look at the text I used for it. I tried filling in text before in my practice run, which was like 11 words long, it took me months. I don’t know how I’m going to fill out 94 words, but I’ll figure it out. Or just do it.

So now I’ve left it for two hours and I can see clearly again. And I’m gunna put the pansy pattern below this, and maybe go crazy and start the embroidery. I don’t think I have enough black thread. Maybe I should do everything in colour? We’ll find out. Maybe this one should be deep purple. I’m thinking about it. Oof, look at that “We will be” it’s so wonky, incredible.

Introducing the Proud Words Project

This is a blog for sharing this art project that I have wanted to do for a long time, and documenting the progress, so, for the first post I’m going to introduce what exactly is the Proud Words Project.

I love embroidery. I also love literature. I also love being queer. So, this project is a combination of those three things: I am embroidering on a pride flag passages and quotes from queer books that have had an impact on me as an individual. 

I got the idea for this project last summer when I went to Pride for the first time with my mother. We only stayed to watch the parade because I have a sad case of being panicky in new situations. so anyway, we went to Pride, and then we visited Mary Shelley’s grave, and then we went book shopping, where I bought the second volume of Heartstopper and Evelyn Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies. All of that is unrelated, but they all got me thinking along the lines that gave me the idea for the project: Pride, the impact an author has on a person, queer(ish) books. And thus: the project was born. But not yet, because I needed a pride flag for the project, and I already had plans for the two flags I’d already bought. So, I had to message my friend to buy one for me, because by the time I thought about it, we’d already left. So I had to wait for us to meet up at our friend’s going away party, to exchange money for the flag. And then, I left it in another friend’s bag. So I had to wait to go see Spiderman: Far From Home to get the flag. And then, I had a breakdown, as I sometimes do with my mental health, so then I had to wait to be sane enough to work on it.

And so it’s January. And the project has begun!

I wanted to start a blog for this project because it’s going to take me a long time, and also because I’m not in education or employment due to the aforementioned mental health and I am going completely off the walls nuts on my own and I need to use up the time that I have by doing something completely over the top, time consuming and unnecessary. Also I miss the structure of making progress blogs and diaries that I had to do at A-Level for stuff, and I need to shout into the void over this. Here we are: a blog. 13 passages. Some illustrations. An explanation of what that passage means to me.