Disclaimer: This is me sharing my personal experiences and my take on them. I’m not trying to persuade anyone of anything. I’m not judging anyone who has had a different experience. | Links to collection & social media are at the end of the post.
If I made a mask based on each of the hobbies I’ve tried there would be way more than 35. However, some of these hobbies are more interesting or particularly dear to me — or they make for visually interesting masks. Embroidery, I believe, is a case of both.
For most of my life, I wasn’t really interested in embroidery. More so, at some point I was kind of actively disinterested in it.
My very first encounter with embroidery was in 2nd grade. We were taught to embroider — or, to be more accurate, cross-stitch — towels with a few (probably) traditional patterns, using very simple stitches. I remember it but I also remember that it went by without really touching me in any way. Just another school thing, somewhat fun to do, but also not very inspiring.
Later, at a different school, in grade 6 or 7 we were taught some more embroidery. We were taught a few different stitches, but we weren’t really given an interesting final project or shown any possibilities, how cool some embroidery works can look — so it all felt a bit meh.
In my late teens I made a friend who was very much into cross-stitching. She bought patterns and followed them, the appeal of which I’ve never understood.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never judged her for having this hobby or even the hobby itself. But as a curious person I like to «try on» different hobbies and activities and I’ve never felt interesting in this — or any other similar hobby, like paint by numbers and such, where you are given a pattern, instructions how to fill it in, and often the exact materials you need.
I don’t mind «meditative» repetitive activities, but I guess this was not the right kind of «meditative» for me? I realized that I’d rather create something imperfect, crooked, weird, etc, but create it myself rather than mindlessly fill in a pattern someone created with pre-selected colors and materials.
For many years, I, for some reason, thought that those experiences of mine kind of summed up embroidery. I marked it as something I’m not interested in and didn’t go back to it.
And then, a little over a year ago, I saw some modern embroideries online and I was shocked, well, by everything: the variety, the colors, the topics, the materials, the potential! I saw that it went way beyond what I knew about it — and then a few steps further.
And I knew I wanted to get in on it.
I watched a few online courses, bought a bunch of supplies. I got lucky when I came to my favorite charity shop to see if they had some embroidery floss — I got a large bag of it (some tangled but still quite a lot of good thread) for about 3 dollars.
And… I started doing embroidery. Some is pretty tame, some is naughty, some experimental. My biggest piece is a 30 cm hoop covered in beads, sequins, and real amber. You can see some of my embroidery works on my Instagram.
I slowed down a bit when I got into digital art, but it looks like embroidery is a hobby that’ll stay with me for quite a while.
Now let me tell you about the mask.
Like all the masks in the collection, it has a paper mache base (you can read about me making it here and here).
I knew immediately that I wanted to embroider it but the rest was unclear.
I didn’t want to embroider cloth and then glue it onto the mask: first of all because it doesn’t differ much from what I’ve done before with embroidery, and second, I was worried that I wouldn’t quite be able to glue the cloth onto a curvy mask and not mess up the design.
I wanted to embroider the mask itself but I also wanted to incorporate cloth…
Eventually I decided on the following: I glued cloth to the mask and then embroidered it, both cloth and mask together.
Embroidering a paper mache mask turned out to be quite tough, much harder than embroidering cloth — I kind of expected that. What you see on it took me quite a while. The mask looked a bit empty but I also didn’t feel like embroidering more.
To fill the space, I also added some embroidery thread, a needle, and a needle minder. Those are some things I actually used so if this mask doesn’t find a buyer I’ll most likely disassemble it and keep using these things.
And that is it for this mask — but feel free to ask questions, here or on Twitter.
Thank you for reading!
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