Threadfully Yours

As aforementioned, we used our last swap as the basis for this piece. Specifically, we decided to create watercolor embroideries focusing on the insect in our last snail mail exchange. This created a literal swap in both the content and product; Allie’s embroidery depicts a butterfly native to Miami sent over by Michelle, while Allie’s butterfly that was collected in Chicago is the focus of Michelle's watercolor. Michelle’s choice of embroidery on paper contrasts with the experimental route of Allie’s watercolor on cloth. Stitched details are seen in both the butterfly wings and the background, with the colors of each piece inspired by the remaining objects from the samples received.

*disclosure: no insects were harmed in the process*

SUMMER TIME SWAP

Finally! The day you have all been waiting for SAIC grads!

If your experience was anything like ours, you know the feeling of those four years passing by like light years; the first day moving into the dorms is just as memorable as the excruciating all-nighters put into a piece before the day of critique. Since graduating, SAIC has polished up a bit and we couldn’t be happier to call ourselves alumni of the conceptual school.

Class of 2015: you’ve especially garnered quite the buzz about Graduation speakers! Despite all the controversy, Kanye West is a fan of SAIC to which we share common ground. Before his hip hop days, he pursued visual arts. As interdisciplinary artists, we are advocates for tapping into multiple mediums, forms, and inspiration. Music is definitely one of the top! Graduating is a start of a new chapter and paths; it can be exhilarating and rocky all at the same time. Thus, we found it suiting to choose a favorite song from our most recent high-profile honorary alum and create a tribute of the fibrous variety. Allie chose “Good Morning”, the first track off of Kanye’s Graduation album; an album that got a lot of play time in her last year of high school as she was about to graduate and return to her birth city of Chi-town to attend SAIC (“Homecoming” had a whole new meaning.) Michelle chose “Touch the Sky”, one of the most played and uplifting jams while creating in the studio. Both undoubtedly provide a great beat, as well as a striking message: to remember to greet each day as a fresh start to reach our dreams!

Cheers grads & welcome to the alumni family!

Task: Dye strips of muslin in an onion dye bath and create a small weaving.

What better way to top off April than with a natural dye swap? With the all too familiar Easter egg dyeing ritual, we wanted to extend the tradition by creating our own dyes using onion skins. An extension to fiber arts, natural dyeing has been trending as of late & we are loving it! To begin, we had yellow in mind as the color for our natural dye. As we found, this layered veggie is more than just an instant trigger for some crocodile tears, rather, onion skin produces shades of gold, orange, and sand tones!

Do you have something in your studio that makes you feel lucky? We certainly have a few things! This month we didn't send each other weavings; instead we made embroideries depicting a couple tools we couldn't get through our weaving swaps without! Allie loves her lucky mini boat shuttles which make weaving even the thinnest of threads a breeze, and Michelle's trusty thread snippers have helped her trim up loose ends on all our small-scale swaps. We hope you all have a lucky day today, in the studio or otherwise!

This month we wanted to show a little weaving L-O-V-E, taking the modern Valentine for a little spin! We had a lot to celebrate this week: both of our birthdays, Threadfully Yours’ half birthday, and of course Valentine’s Day. Naturally, we wanted this weaving swap to be fun-filled so we wove each other unique valentines, and gave away two more to a couple of our faithful Instagram followers. Check out our Instagram feed to see our winners! (link at the top of the Tumblr blog). We wish you all a wonderful weekend full of XO's!

Task: Weave an 8 ½ x 11 + piece representing a symbol.

Symbology is rooted in the origins of our modern language, in universal connectivity, and spiritual revival. Fast forward to the 21st Century, and we continue to dissect archaic passages, hieroglyphics, and quipus that formed the base of communicating within a civilization. For our second large woven swap, our inspiration came from symbols and how they culminate in our daily thoughts. Conscientiously, they appear on tattoos, clothes, and almost every recognizable brand logo (Apple just wouldn’t be the same without its infamous, you guessed it, apple icon). Unconsciously, they can be abstract, appearing in dreams, folklore, or in our imaginations.

So what is it about symbols that are oh so appealing? For us, it is an affinity towards certain signs that we immediately gravitate towards. Like anything else, we foster this sentiment to make it our own. These weavings were formed after reflection of cultural symbols of communication, and how they have evolved into their digital form. Our focus was on process, thinking about how our chosen symbols would translate on cloth.

Each weaver approached this swap with their own interpretation: Allie drawing directly from the symbols we use each day on physical or touch screen keyboards, while Michelle used her favorite symbol of motion, direction and traveling. Both symbols have an interesting little history of evolution from handwritten to digital, and in these weavings old and new technologies are crossing paths. The digital is examined in a double-cloth pick-up, and the traditional is modernized with a pop of neon!

Happy New Year!

We both had a great first day of 2015 yesterday, and we hope you did too. Thanks all, for following our project!

With the year coming to a close, we decided to switch things up a bit! While Allie spends the holidays in the warmth of the West Coast, Michelle is ready to jet-set from MIA to CHI to countdown the final hours of 2014 and commence anew. As things go, we will literally be missing each other coming and going from O’Hare airport by just an hour! :( Yup, that’s right...just our luck!

To honor our locations of celebration, we completed a final mini swap. Pre-travels, we each wove a small square with colors reminiscent of our anticipated destinations. Allie’s choice of blue and green symbolized sunny blue skies, and tuning into that pleasant palm tree California state of mind! The iconic Chicago flag was the inspiration for Michelle’s, with a dash of silver wire to reference Millennium Park. The use of white wool, could of course only refer to one thing - the inevitable snow.

As Millennials, symbols seem to be ever present in our daily lives, especially in the digital era. With emoticons and emojis integrating more into our language, both in handwritten notes and texts, we felt it to be a prevalent reference for our latest mini swap! These handheld woven pieces commemorate symbols of our generation, conveniently sized to a perfect square frame that all of us Instagrammers have grown far too familiar with. Whether it be a flashback to AIM, or to the present, emoticons are in themselves a way of expression to adorn a conversation, replace verbal written words, or adding a little extra something. 

Task: weave an 8 ½ x 11 piece using only white yarn. 

These weavings are considered an introduction to our project, and the weavers behind it. Using the same color palette, only white yarn, the focus of the weaving is on material type, pattern choices and structural techniques. The dimensions of the pieces are that of standard US letter paper, referencing a handwritten letter that is mailed from one weaver to the other. No exchanges regarding descriptions or images of the weavings were shared until each weaver received the other’s package via mail. Yet, both weavers were inspired by elements of letter writing: Allie by shifting paragraph blocks and Michelle by the written letter format.

How It All Began

As previously mentioned, we met each other in Chicago at SAIC four years ago. Allie was working on a collaborative and public interactive weaving piece to take place at Cloud Gate (aka The Bean), while Michelle originally sought to join the Fashion Department but found herself more intrigued by tactile material and textural surface studies that the Fiber Department offered. We met in an elevator in our dorm building as Allie was handing out flyers for the Cloud Gate project. We spent the summer that year working together for our student life department and getting to know each other as artists and friends. Within a few months time, we were both hooked on weaving and living in the Fibers Department at SAIC!