Patchwork Collage, Cloth Books, Etc.
Background
My grandmother was a quilter. She hosted quilting bees and had an amazing closet of nothing but stacks of fabric and sewing supplies. Her work was amazing and beautiful… and very exact. I was enamored of her cloth room, loved what thread could do and how it looked, but I couldn’t get excited about the strictness of piecing together quilts. There were so many rules and a lot of ways to get things wrong. But I still kept sewing in small ways – stitching together paper and negatives for a photography class, sewing onto collages, and making little cloth brooches. After college, I started mending my clothes, seeing Gee’s Bend quilt exhibits in museums, and finding purposefully imperfect textile art on Pinterest. I learned the words slow stitching.
Hand Sewing & Slow Stitching
Slow stitching reminds me of collage. The process doesn’t involve a pattern, just cloth scraps that get shuffled around until something “feels right”. The stitches are visable and allowed to land where they land. It grows organically and looks more playful. I think of the stitches like handwriting – individual to the person and full of personality. I also like that there’s room in these kinds of projects to showcase used fabrics – worn thin, well-loved, and usually attached to a story. My grandmother might have given it all the side-eye, but I love that nothing is straight. Or is straight wonky as hell.
TLDR
I love sewing by hand, the look and process of slow stitching, embroidery, and cross-stitching. I like using patterns for cross-stitching and sometimes for embroidery, but will usually pick out my own colors. New in the last couple of years: creating cloth books. Mostly because I started stitching along with Ann Wood 100 day challenges. But also because I love books very much. Below are a few larger projects from the last few years. It’s a real mish-mash.
First cloth book – each page has a painted cyanotype patch featuring nature from our garden with cloth details, embroidered names, and blanket-stitched edges:
Lacy vintage coaster with a stitched bird in a crocheted chain stitch “frame” of yellow thread with quilt top snippets:
Starry night scene on a small dresser scarf:
A few pages from a fall-themed cloth book sewn over the course of several months in 2024 (finally assembled and bound in 2025):
PS: for more reading about slow stitching, here’s someone with a really lovely explanation.