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\nThursday night embroidery club, for the second time.<\/p>\n
\nThursday night embroidery club, for the second time.<\/p>\n
Last time everyone worked on their own projects. For this time the group decided to try out dogma<\/i> embroidery. I’m not sure what it might be called in English, and to be honest, I’m not sure the concept even exists outside of some very narrow pockets of Scandinavian crafts circles. <\/p>\n
There’s an e-book<\/a> at the bottom of it all, and articles about it draw parallels back all the way to the ancient Greeks. Since the author is Danish, I suspect it was more likely inspired by Dogme 95<\/a>, a movement in film-making, originating in Denmark, that sets strict limits on the tools and techniques allowed. The embroidery version is not quite the same, but it’s still built upon the same idea of strict rules.<\/p>\n Jytte Harboesgaard, as quoted in the T\u00e4cklebo Broderiakademi members’ magazine in 2015:<\/p>\n \nVi var vana vid att broderiet var ett stygnprov eller skulle bli n\u00e5got best\u00e4mt. Detta menar jag \u00e4r en av orsakerna till att det \u00e4r s\u00e5 sv\u00e5rt att f\u00f6rnya broderiet, vilket jag anser att vi m\u00e5ste om broderiet skall ha ett ber\u00e4ttigande i framtiden. Det var h\u00e4r id\u00e9n till konceptet Dogmabroderi f\u00f6ddes. I Dogmabroderiet broderar man efter regler som man sj\u00e4lv best\u00e4mmer\u2026 Den viktigaste regeln \u00e4r att broderiet inte ska anv\u00e4ndas till n\u00e5got best\u00e4mt. Ist\u00e4llet \u00e4r det sj\u00e4lva processen att brodera “fritt” efter reglerna som \u00e4r den viktiga drivkraften.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \nWe were used to embroidering either a sampler or in order to make a particular thing. In my opinion, this is one of the reasons why it is so difficult to reinvent embroidery, which I believe we have to if embroidery is to have a future. This is where the idea of the concept of dogma embroidery was born. In dogma embroidery, you embroider based on a set of rules that you set yourself. The most important rule is that the embroidery won’t be used for any predetermined thing. Instead the process of embroidering “freely” based on the rules is the driving force.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In our case, since most of us were doing it for the first time, one of the members who’d done it before provided us with rules, one by one, so we’d see what dogma rules might look like. The first rule was “a 30×30 cm piece of fabric”. Then “using the greenest thread you have, start in the middle of the fabric, and make 30 backstitches”, followed by “at least 10 French knots” and “a doodle that doesn’t look like anything”. The next step, “three circles of blanket stitch around the French knots” was a bit of a challenge because there was not much room but I just had to think bigger.<\/p>\n The next two steps we got with us as homework. “Find an area where your work is unbalanced, and fill it with seed stitch” (which suits me very well because the doodle is crying out for something to link it to the rest) and “using white thread, lighten up your work” (which will be interesting given that I’m using white fabric).<\/p>\n To really push yourself out of your comfort zone, you’d finish one dogma<\/i> embroidery, then take a new piece of fabric and repeat the exact same rules on that one, for a new and different outcome. And then do it again, and again.<\/p>\n