Transcript: Embroidery

Austin Connoisseur
Episode “Embroidery”

Jenny Hart: Sublime stitching really is about providing creative resources and creative inspiration for other people. I think everybody needs a creative outlet of some sort. I am really inspired by what I don’t see, a lot of my work comes out of a kind of desire of saying you know I have never seen that done. Where is it, look for it, and then I do it.
I am Jenny Hart and you are in my sewing room, I am an embroidery artist and I also founded a company called Sublime Stitching with updated patterns in resources for embroidery. You can see my artwork at jenny hart .net and you can buy sublime stitching kits and patterns at sublimestitching.com. I started Sublime Stitching in the fall of 2001 that was a year after I started embroidering and I had been working with embroidery for my artwork, doing portraits and original kinds of compositions.
I did not know how to sew and I had never done any needlework, I did not know anybody who did. I mean it was a good three or four years before I actually did it, I asked my mom to finally show me and I got addicted to it. I tend to have a little edge of anxiety and I’m a little high strung and I’ve always got to be doing something so for me to sit still and embroider I thought I would never be able to do that and I will never have the patience for it, it is going to make my skin crawl. Then I realize that embroidery instills patience in you and it actually calms you down.
I was so surprised that there were not any updated resources for learning how to embroider. There weren’t any kind of contemporary designs, there wasn’t anything that stepped outside of the realm of teddy bears and barnyard animals and that was a real turnoff, and that was why no one from my generation was doing it. I grew up reading a lot of comics like Robert Crumb and S. Clay Wilson and Robert Williams. I grew up in a house where commercial art, illustration like comic art wasn’t seen as anything apart from fine art.
I started making collages when I was really young, when I was like 14 and 15 and started making collages and actually got a lot of attention for the work that I was doing. I started thinking about embroidering and I thought well that would be such a wonderful medium to apply to original illustration and I did, I got completely obsessed with it. I am embroidered like 3 to 4 hours a day and it goes into the design aspect of the company too. Where I am designing these patterns and then customers go and embroider them up and a lot of times customers will send me pictures of their projects. That is like collaboration to me to I get to see people embroider my drawing and it is really satisfying and fun.
I moved to Austin and 99, in the summer of 99, I was supposed to go to New York and I was really worried that Austin was going to feel like too much of a small town. I love Austin, for me it offers all the things that a big city has to offer yet without the stifling aspects. The really nurturing, the genuinely supportive creative community that there is here, I’ve never been some place where the people are so sincerely interested in what other people are doing and are constantly trying to find a way to nurture it or help it along.
I do feel like Austin has been my partners in making Sublime Stitching happen I really don’t feel like I could make it happen in another place as I did in Austin. I am known best for being a so called expert in embroidery and I am no expert in embroidery. I am a beginner and I show people that do not know how to embroider how other beginners learn to do it.
I think a lot of people look at embroidery and think it is tedious and grandmaish and I think you just have to try it. If you want to start embroidering without sounding too much like a company shill, I would say get my kit, because it is designed for people to learn to embroider. It is the only kit that puts all the tools together.
There was not a book that said you need a hoop, this is why you need it and this is how you put your fabric on the hoop, this is how you thread a needle. Everything assumed because it was 30 or 40 years old it assumed that women grew up being taught by their mothers how to sew. So I wanted to put together a kit that said here’s a kit with everything you needed to get started in embroidery, it will teach you how to use the tools, it will teach you some starter stitches. I wanted the instructions to be encouraging, I wanted them to be entertaining; I wanted them to say it is about being creative and playful and you’re going to make mistakes. You’re not a robot so it is the fact that it looks like it was made by hand is really the charm and the appeal of it.
I have devoted my life, I’ve actually devoted my life in the past six are seven years to educating people about embroidery and to keep it from dying as a hand craft, by making sure that people have the resources and the inspiration to keep doing it. My name is Jenny Hart and I am a connoisseur.