Stitch is a gentle and impactful manner to tell stories, create imagery, and spend time.
Take, for instance this graffiti, a snapshot taken while in Barcelona, Spain, just over five years ago. I love birds, and am smitten with the quick, illegal stroke of the graffiti artists’ hand. Combine the two, and I definitely feel the need to snap a photo and go on to figure out how to use it in my own work!
While most of the imagery I use in my work is drawn by myself, I don’t really feel badly about recreating a graffiti drawings in my work. I receive graffiti as an issue of the public domain, perhaps I am wrong in my thinking, I do not know. Beside which, I will not be selling any work with that bird in it, it is for my own enjoyment and personal use.
That trip to Spain was quite pivotal to me as an artist. I saw some graffiti that bowled me over and made me seriously embrace upon how to go about multicolor printing. That trip caused me to change course artistically.
It made me start using stitch differently too. I began to use stitch as a means to journal, to use cloth as a place to store memories, thread as a medium to impart color, to draw and even to write. It made me start thinking of stitch as my own personal form of graffiti. Even if I am not doing it illicitly. 🙂
It feels good to settle back into embroidery and stitch. In the next month or so, I will be creating content for my newly renovated teaching web site, The Clever Guild (there have been some behind the scenes updates and I am still fiddling with the particulars-but it is coming together, finally). I will be working with the idea of Journal Stitching and hope you might be interested in taking a class with me.
In the meantime, please read my rambles about the process here!
Melanie Testa 
Cue up the music! It’s happy dance time!!! You know how much I love to hand stitch and to learn to express myself more freely in stitch would be a blessing. You just made my day. I love the bird graffiti. Our graffiti is mostly gang tags. While they can sometimes be beautiful, they tend to be off puttting. When I go to the big cities, I am always looking at the boxcars along the way to see what artists in other parts of the world have marked on them. xoxo
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unfortunately I don’t live next door from you, but I’d love to take an online class with you in stitching. I bought your book a long time ago and I follow the blog but it would be great to be taken by the hand and follow a project from start to finish. I love the embroidered supplies bags. and as far as I can see in the sneak peek the project with the graffity bird will be great too.
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