Towards flow: Cross-stitching poetry

Abstract

Abstract This portrait describes the author’s recent transition from fashion design to hand embroidery, in particular poetry cross-stitched by hand. The transition is underpinned by the author’s background in sustainability in fashion and textiles, and it is partly driven as a response to recent political developments in the United States. Craft becomes a potent site for political activism in the form of cross-stitched poetry. Poetry allows an economy of words difficult to achieve through other modes of writing, and it complements the author’s conventional academic writing. The cross-stitch poetry methods comprise both digital and manual spaces; digital tools are crucial to the author’s process of hand embroidery. The slow pace of hand stitching affords meditation on each letter and word, as a counterpoint to the urgency of most written communication today. This pace is an access to ‘nature’s time’, as an alternative to a pace of working primarily based on efficiency or productivity. Colonization, as a white person in Native spaces and as a male in traditionally female spaces, is in constant negotiation in the author’s work; as a white male it is easy, even automatic, to be the dominator, the colonizer. Nonetheless the author sees cross-stitch as a potent medium for taking a stand on injustice.