Running Thread: On Embroidery and Poetry
/ Article by Jennifer Anne Champion
When I picked up embroidery seriously in February of 2021, it wasn’t with the direct intention of tying it to my poetry practice. I just needed to get away from people and their thoughts on my devices. Every time my phone buzzed, I felt a deep anxiety. I had to find a way to keep my hands occupied, and not pick up calls or type replies I might regret.
My first attempt at embroidery looked like this:
Failed attempt at embroidering a cat as a kumiho
If you can believe it, that is my cat as a kumiho.
You need not to spare my feelings in telling me this is terrible. I have since done better at rendering my cat. So much better that I was selected for my first exhibition of embroidery and poetry in June of this year as part of Art Outreach Singapore’s programmes – three months into picking up this skill. To have my work displayed so speedily before I had fully mastered what I had initially picked up as a method of mental wellness mirrored what had happened to me in my poetry practice. You start out almost jokingly for yourself, never thinking you’ll get good and then regardless of how you feel about yourself, people respond and resonate with what you’ve done. The sewing hoop became a portal to a world of connection I was trying to escape, but at a pace an interaction I could handle.
Something similar happens with poetry.. If you dare to share your work with the world, there is someone out there who will be called to it. This happens whether or not you like what you’ve written. I feel this way about an old poem I wrote on SingPoWriMo in 2014 called I Am Unicorn (But No One Believes Me). Back then, I had been writing poetry unseriously for slightly less than two years. The poem responded to the prompt: Write a poem about yourself that isn’t true. I decided to play with truth and self-perception without any particular poetics beyond my cringey love for sporadic end-rhyme. To my surprise, it became my most loved poem by the community at the time.
Below is an updated version of this poem for 2021 and translated into an embroidered image.
Embroidery inspired by poem “I Am Not A Unicorn…”
I’m Not A Unicorn...
by Jennifer Anne Champion
But everyone wants to believe in magic.
In words pointed like a radio antenna to god.
Someone on okcupid asks if I am aware
being a unicorn is a fetish.
Someone on instagram asks if I stand next to them
will they get better wifi.
A child hears my poems. Rewrites them as her own
and draws me a thank you
note: I nod as if I knew all this would happen too.
But the stories we tell ourselves about our selves
pale in the light of conclusions we have not reached.
I don’t know what’s at the end of my cup
even though I drink so much tea and the children
still laugh sometimes at the punchlines. Who will they be
at the end of a poem? Who will I be at the end
rhyme – spelling out a truth which is a lie of which
there are many? It’s hard to keep a heart clean
after all these years.
I am not a unicorn which is to say I am
better a person than a one-trick phony.
Embroidery Techniques Translated As Poetry Techniques
A .gif of the process of making the “I Am Not A Unicorn…” embroidery
The syllable and the single thread
Firstly, I sew with a single thread. All embroidery floss is six-stranded and while some like this chunky look and it is definitely faster to cover a surface area when you’re working with more thread, I want fineness and detail.
Similarly in poetry, the base unit is not the word but the syllable. Tiny rhymed metrical systems which are pleasing to the ear can be achieved in work even if the poet does not write with form in mind by working with the syllable. Spoken word poets are particularly attuned to this because rhyme and metre are our strongest workhorses.
Outline your work
In order for your stitches not to look a mess, you have to bound them, preferably with a thread of the same colour or darker as seen in the .gif above. This neatness is an extra step but it’s well worth it. This is similarly true of poetry – some poets utilise form to structure their poems – but even in free-form, preparatory outlining can help the poet understand where they’re going.
I once knew a poet who kept scores of notebooks with poems half-written. They were outlined with a beginning, an end and bullet points in the middle that would then be rendered into verse. Sometimes these middle lines would just be a direction for mood, transitions or brackets with ellipses. In his method, the poem was to be shaded in eventually but not before the outline was clear.
Colour and shading
I lay out all the colours I’m going to use before a piece and check them under both warm and fluorescent light. If the colour combinations don’t work in both lights – for example a particular shade is too yellow or blue toned compared to other chosen shades – chances are they will work in some lights but distort in others. I learnt this technique from a painter.
Colour, too, is about complement and contrast. In the above embroidery, I picked complementary shades of blue and a contrasting neon yellow and cream. You need both contrast and complement for balance in an image.
Similarly, in my poetry classes, I teach the concept of a word palette (thank you Scott Sneddon for teaching me this years ago). If you list out words first, rather than thoughts, on a scrap of paper, you can analyse them for tone much easier and combine them into more interesting phrases than if you did it as a full phrase in your head. It’s a bit like doing your working sums for math on a rough paper, but for art people.
Checking your shades of meaning against a light, that is not the body of the poem, can lead to more effective and interesting results.
Conclusion
Of course the methods and analogies I’ve drawn, translating embroidery to poetry technique, are not the only ones available to the poet. There are some people who just straight up write and that’s okay. When I think of that first ‘cat’, that was an example of straight-up sewing, and in its own way, it’s pretty cool. But as I think my poem demonstrates, you grow and outgrow the standards you set for yourself. Knowing this has always made me dissatisfied with my work to the point of making it as I know, possibly within days or weeks, I get markedly better at it.
It will be my eternal struggle to know a slightly better version of my work is waiting round the corner. If you have been in the SingPoWriMo community for a while and sharing your work fills you with a little bit of dread, I feel you. But it's also like a fluorescent light. Even if no one provides critique, the act of putting it out there can be enough for you to see what needs fixing because you will be more conscious of having a multitudinous gaze. And even then, it may not be as harsh a light as you think.
Perhaps the greatest thing about this community is that we are all in this together – translating feelings and stories we barely understand into art.
Thank you for reading this essay, internet. Here is my current work-in-progress of my cat.
Current work-in-progress of Orpheus, the poet’s cat