Yesterday I released a new Youtube Video with the same title.

Go check it out!

There are a few other key factors to interpretive hand stitching, improvisational hand stitching, expressionist hand stitching or whatever else you might want to call it.  I think all of these are good descriptors of my process when taking a piece of linen and starting to stitch on it.

The first few stitches

However at a certain point, composition plays a key role in how the piece evolves. It’s not enough to just stitch and hope for the best.  Without a good composition it can look like a bunch of disparate parts, each might be lovely taken on their own, but they aren’t necessarily interacting well with one another.

More stitching added…

Another common issue is that one part can take over, drowning out everything else; this brings its own set of challenges.  Or perhaps the whole thing is stagnant.  There’s not a great deal of movement, so it’s important to know when these things are happening and why.  Without knowing why, it is nearly impossible to remedy.

Once the large X was removed the two half moons in the upper right and again in the lower left began to dominate

The trick then is to resolve the “divas” and figure out how to turn the volume down or remove them.  In this case, I had to remove it.  Between the shape and color it was too much.  Except that when it was removed, I was faced with a new challenge.

Piece without the darker shapes

So that’s where I am right now. I’m sitting with the challenge of having removed three domineering shapes.  Taken on their own, they were fine, but when seen as a whole they were dominating.  Except now the piece isn’t grounded.  It’s lost some of its vigor.  Partly that’s due to the removal of the color, which lended a great deal to the overall piece.  So now I have to figure out how to pull it together, give it some excitement.  And this is how it goes.  There’s a kind of ebb and flow that inevitably happens when working on a piece like this.  Take away some aspect and suddenly there’s a new set of challenges.

The key is to not give in to discouragement.  To keep going no matter what.  To keep trying new things.  Thinking out of the box, pushing the boundaries of what I know how to do, trying something I’ve not tried before, test out other colors or reintroduce a color I’ve removed and see how that shifts the conversation.

This is the process that is interpretive hand stitching.  Where one idea leads to another and another and another and on it goes.