Category: Stitching

Letting go and getting on it

3/22/2025

Our job as artists is to imagine different futures

(Originally published Feb. 23, 2025 on Substack)

I made a bit of a scene when Friedrich Irrgang confirmed that he was retiring after 62 short years in the timepiece-repair business. And just what will become of my wristwatch that he’s been bringing back from the dead on an irregular basis?, I asked him. The inner workings are falling apart, he said in the kind manner of a veterinarian examining someone’s geriatric bag-of-bones cat. True, the watch was a gift for my 30th birthday which was not yesterday or even this century but to let go of the watch and this neighbourhood shop at the same time? That, Herr Irrgang, is a brücke too far!

I know; this reaction was unbecoming for the full-grown woman that I am but the little personal losses are piling onto the big public losses like, say, faith in the future of democracy. It’s harder to counter the latest attack on societal norms with “At least” replies but I know I must stay positive, even when it comes to the small stuff! For example, instead of getting alarmed at my thinning hair, I can just go outside and brush out all my falling-out hairs for the birds to use for their nests! Or like when I spiral-fractured my arm but then turned the plaster cast into a model for sleeves I fashioned from dyed doilies. Lemons to lemonade!

Above: “Coverup No. 2”, 2019: Found doily, plaster cast (Carlyn Yandle)

I’ve also found some buoyancy in reading over-privileged tourists’ one-star reviews of exotic travel excursions. (“The glow worms were disappointing” is a standout.) And I’m always making something with my hands to stop myself from wringing them, so there’s that.

Above: Recontextualized disintegrating polypropylene rope found on a West Coast shoreline plays with ideas of ‘pretty’ and ‘pretty disturbing.’ (Carlyn Yandle)

Even my own painting disasters can bring me joy when I allow myself to fuck aroundexperiment with materials and ideas.

Above: “Regrowth”, 2019: A 24” x 24” acrylic-on-canvas painting from 2013 re-emerges as wall sculpture attached by sewing pins. (Carlyn Yandle)

In summary: Less teeth-gnashing over what is lost or becoming lost; more creative engaging with materials and people; more investigating ways to transform the truly terrible; more joyful making in these perilous times.

End of an era for Vancouver makers

9/7/2024

The one great store that fuels textile dreams is closing due to small-business struggles

Judging by the early deluge of reactions on Reddit last week, we Vancouver makers are stunned to learn that our mecca for material and more is selling off its inventory and properties and closing for good. And I’m dealing with it like the full-grown woman I am.

Damn you! Damn you all to Hell!

Vancouver has never had the big shmata (cloth trade) districts like Montreal or Toronto. In these parts, we have Dressew Supply, a sort of rough-around-the-edges department store almost bursting with bolts of liquidation fabrics, sparkly applique patches, headbanger wigs, thousands of buttons, zippers, feather boas, skeins of yarn, rolls of ribbon and every sewing notion imaginable to satisfy the city’s crafty counter-culture vibe.

Vancouver never had the garment district of Toronto, where “Uniform Measure/Stack" (1997), designed by Stephen Cruise (stephencruise.ca), monumentalizes objects of the trade, originally with painted path of yellow measuring tape.

I am with my people here: the grandmothers who sew Christmas-gift pajamas, the goths, the quilters, the film and theatre set designers, the dance-gymnastics girls, the fashion-school students, and more recently, Pride paraders, Halloween costumers and cosplayers. Moving through those jammed aisles of colour and pattern revitalizes the brain, especially in our soggy, dark mid-winters.

I have a long history of ruining homemade garments made from my purchases at Dressew. I blame this on the tedious, mandatory Grade 8 girls’ sewing class designed to turn us into skilled workers or housewives. So when my community-college-student budget demanded I make my own nightclubbing “look” and wedding-guest frocks, I took an improv approach, using the cheapest $2/yard “100% unknown fibers” fabrics that smelled as flammable as they looked. I was lured by the big books of “Make it tonight!” Butterick, Style and Simplicity patterns and when this timeline proved unlikely, I’d game the instructions by swapping, say, a long back zipper with self-adhesive Velcro, or cramming in some thick shoulder pads to try to give shape to my latest sagging acetate atrocity. I don’t have photographic evidence of the voluminous emerald taffeta dress with the watermelon-sized sleeves that I wore to a cousin’s wedding but I can see in the snapshot of the baby-blue Cinderella-style dress at another wedding that I didn’t see ‘fit’ as an area of concern.

Nevertheless I persisted! I dreamed big, undeterred by minimal skill and patience or my wonky sewing machine that I dropped on the floor more than once. These projects were doomed to fail, like the grey pin-striped double-breasted suit for my university boyfriend who actually wore the blazer for a while but who was also likely relieved that the trousers never materialized. And I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to all those unwilling children in my life who endured the double humiliation of being gifted one of my hand-sewn polar-fleece hats and posing for a photo in it for their mother’s thank-you note.

Evidence of ill-fitting, over-padded and plain cruel past projects.

The magic of that store is in the endless possibilities and I always left with hope in my heart that this time I will read the directions. I will take breaks. I will use pins. I will find scissors that don’t chew the fabric. I will not view interfacing as optional.
I eventually redeemed myself as the family-and-friends’ Halloween costume-maker, taking the bus downtown with one kid or another while conferring over their concept drawing that I assigned to weed out the uncommitted. They also had to help cut, sew, glue and paint as required, so I wouldn’t take all the blame for shoddy workmanship.

Learning to sew is more fun when it’s a costume.

I also got pretty good at reupholstering because I had the good sense to take some continuing-ed classes on the subject as a young adult (rather than a self-conscious, hormonal 13-year-old) led by a retired skilled professional. Still on a tight budget, I learned to revamp found vintage armchairs with Dressew’s bargain upholstery fabrics but moved over to making crib quilts for all the new babies. Eventually I got serious about fibre art and went to art school. When the pandemic lockdown hit I re-focused my plans for my stash of quilting cotton and sewed up three-layer cotton masks — so many masks — to fill the early gap in the supply chain. Elastic was a scarce commodity and that’s where the owner at Dressew stepped up, delivering yardage of elastic to me from the shuttered store’s back alley door, like a dealer doing a drop.

So many Covid masks, made possible during lockdown by Dressew.

The imminent demise leaves me — us — in the lurch. Shopping by the hand-feel (and smell) of fabrics, yarn, fun fur, trims, felt, wigs, and all the strange liquidation items is an in-person experience in the energizing milieu of other creatives. So now what? Will next year’s Halloween costume missions now take place around the ol’ iPhone peering at fabric images on Amazon, not really knowing what will show up as we hit ‘Add to cart’?
That’s a hard no. Sorry kids.

work-in-progress 'Unbridled' stitches up pain and pleasure

8/31/2022

Exploring tattoo tropes (Carlyn Yandle photo)

Thirty years ago this month I floated down the aisle in a pearly silk dress. Recently I pulled this relic out of deep storage to give it new life.

It is a ballerina-length A-line number, a fitted silhouette of crisp, Japanese Dupioni silk festooned with faux pearls, featuring a winding pattern of woven ivory ribbon stitched around the shoulder and ruche bodice, and bateau neckline edged with mini pearls. A strand of 14 pearl shank buttons nestles into handmade button loops running down the back, disappearing into a bustle of box pleats. A puff of shoulder sleeve slims to a fitted forearm, leading down to three more pearl buttons and ending in a pointed edge at the wrist edged in more pearl trim. The pattern was painstakingly customized by the maid of honour, possibly still this city’s most skilled professional in design development. The sleeve itself is an architectural feat, with three delicate darts at the elbow and invisible underarm gusset for ease of movement when slow-dancing.
The dress was a big effin' deal, is what I'm saying.

Covid-era expression

Following the one night of festivities, the gown and accoutrements — ivory silk pantyhose, pearlescent strappy heels, pearl-bead tiara-hairband thing and matching teardrop earrings — were cocooned in a cotton sheet, placed inside a garment box and embalmed in clear plastic. The box took up precious space, first in an Eastside housing co-op unit, then a Westside condo and finally back to the Eastside where it has been languishing as a past attachment out of place in my much different life. Clearly I needed to address this fetish I had for this dress.

My first job as a full-time newspaper reporter included re-writing submitted wedding announcements — a bit of a comedown after an intensive year of journalism school wrestling with ethical issues and the craft of long-form investigative reporting. Banging out descriptions of sweetheart necklines and fingertip veils was tedious work that made me crabby.

"Nevertheless, she persisted", a Trump-era memento

I resented the notion that this was a ritual of every young woman’s life worthy of space in the local newspaper and the time of a salaried employee. The only vow I was willing to make was to not end up as that girl in the accompanying photo. But question marks hung in the air all through my 20s, not about If but When. Over time my replies of ‘never’ turned into ‘not now’, then ‘who knows’ then ‘soon’ and before the end of my 20s I was a married person with a useless dress in a box.

I’m not nostalgic about the whole patriarchal wedding ritual and its objectifying notions of purity but I did love that dress. Whenever I re-organized my deep storage I would unfurl it from its wrappings, a little ashamed at my attachment to the thing. I needed to poke holes into the whole notion; I needed to break through this pure silk skin.

I texted a friend for support, someone whose own actual skin is needled with ink here and there like it’s no big deal. Do it. Why not just do it?, she texted back. I took a deep breath and plunged the needle into the silk, embedding stitches of ink-black embroidery floss into the ivory cloth. I winced at the first piercing but like tattoos, there was also a flood of pleasure. I began embroidering significant moments of this significant era then hung it on a hanger in my studio until another compulsion came on. This is how this dress and I work together now: it is a work in progress, like that bride who is always still becoming.

I feel zingy about this mark-making with no overall plan that will not be erased, this disruption of expectations for young women — of my time and place, at least. Unbridled is a work in progress, an unkempt keeper, that weaves the pain in with the pleasure.

Reminder of the Women's March on Washington, 2017

The chemotherapy drugs code of a family member close to my heart

Sciatica source, as depicted in tattoo-style lightning bolts

Weather bombs and forests in flames: Tattoo-style flames licking at hem of dress

A bicep full of vaccination pharmaceutical company logos

Moths in flight: symbols of transformation and regeneration

Unwieldy and unfinished — fitting for this pandemic project

6/13/2022

“The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.”
-- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

When my nerves are frayed and it feels like the social fabric is unravelling I feel the urge to amend the situation, often by actual mending.

These hands do much less flailing when they're taking up loose ends, making something out of nothing anybody wants or repairing the damaged, discarded and disregarded. But the pandemic has hit hard and for the first time in ages, I am compelled to fall back on something cozy and familiar, for the body — any body — in need. I need to make a big ol' quilt.

Even as the fleeting thought was bonking around my distracted, pandemic-disturbed brain I worried I was regressing. Are a dozen queen-sized quilts — each a barely-passed test of my patience and endurance — not enough for one lifetime? Have I gone circular?

This (and much more) mental pummelling has manifested in the not-yet-completed "Current Conditions" quilt, a weighted blanket in a bluesy palette and undulating pattern of strips of discarded, freely available jeans. Too thick and heavy to wrestle through my vintage Pfaff, I've taken a page from the Japanese traditional "boro" method and hand-stitched long waves of white cotton sashiko thread through the layers of denim, cotton batting and denim whole-cloth backing.

BORROWING FROM BORO: The "Current Conditions" quilt in progress, after hand-stitching through the layers and before the growing roster of pandemic-era hashtags are embroidered.

Soon another layer emerged: hand-embroidered text in the form of some particularly heavy hashtags over the course of this making. Working each of those hashtags into the strips of found textile has become both a meditative activity as well as a meditation on the meaning of those words of these times. This is my physical engagement with the world, one stitch, one block at a time.

Weighing in at more than 10 hot pounds, "Current Conditions" is an unwieldy beast of a blanket but my stitching encounters with the latest hashtags seem far from over. (Should #monkeypox be included? Do I need to reserve a line for #heatdome2022?). Like the global pandemic at this point, it's not clear whether the beast is finally done or will demand more from me.

Hoping for heat in this log cabin

11/5/2019

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I have this idea for building healthy community in this pretty/cold city through hand-making. It’s a process of making peace with ourselves and connecting with others, transforming individualized desires (thanks, capitalism) into shared desires for a sustainable life and world.

Vancouver artist Jenn Skillen — collaborator No. 1 — beta-tests a freeform, no-measure hand-stitched log cabin block method. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

That's the idea. 'How' is the big question.

I start with a few rules of thumb. (I love that phrase for its controversial origin that is a deep-dive into human history and etymology, but also for the visual of the hand-as-tool.) First, the activity must be low-barrier enough to open it up to as much collaboration as possible — no need for special skills or equipment or fees or even shared verbal language. Second, the project must use only found material: freely available, with no better use (because there's already too much stuff in the world). Third, the project must spark interest, otherwise, why would people bother?

A decade ago, these rules of thumb resulted in The Network, an ever-growing public fibre-art piece engaging a wide variety of folks around Vancouver, co-created by Debbie Westergaard Tuepah. That knotty piece continues to weave through my work, mummifying a perfectly good painting practice, winding around ideas of alternative space-making, shelter, and safety nets. Now it's needling into my current project: the Safe Supply collaborative quilt.

'Safe supply' were the two words on the lips of the crowd at a CBC Town Hall gathering two months ago. Providing a safe supply of opioids would go a long way to addressing all the problems and fears raised by everyone from student activists to local businesses, from concerned politicians and developers to Indigenous elders: the toxic-drug death epidemic, violence, homelessness, sexual exploitation, theft, vandalism, mental illness. A safe supply is inherent in the view of addiction as a public health issue, not an individual, moral failing.

'Kettling' homeless people into Oppenheimer Park has resulted in a colourful display of a national humanitarian crisis. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

Ground zero of this humanitarian crisis is the colourful, chaotic tent city crowded in Oppenheimer Park straddling Chinatown and the old Japantown. The sight of all those bright, tenuous shelters layer up with this history of racism and injustice, stolen land and lives, and soon I am binding up ideas of found colourful material and that call for Safe supply!, embedding it all in a design, with designs for this as a group project destined for exhibit in more privileged spaces. It is planned as a comforting activity in this often ruthless, discomforting city: a dis-comforter.

Historical clipping from the llinois State Museum website reveals the log cabin quilt has ties to ending slavery.

I begin this overarching theme one block at a time, and that block is, fittingly, the traditional 'log cabin.'

There's a long history of the log cabin block, ingenious for its simple construction that makes use of even the smallest, thinnest available scraps as well as its history as a vehicle for social justice.

I am attracted to the name that stands as aspiration for home and all that that entails, beginning with the hearth, the centre of the block. From the hearth, the block is built in a spiral of connected scraps to form a foundation for countless quilt designs (traditional examples below).

The work has not yet begun but like all collaborations it begins with faith in people and trust in my practice. Something will emerge. We will engage. We will generate some heat in this log-cabin community.

Some useful how-tos and overall pattern examples:

Traditional quilts made from colour variations of the log cabin block (clockwise from left): Straight Set, Barn Raising, Light & Dark, Courthouse Steps, Courthouse Steps Variation, Amish Crib Quilt. (From http://www.museum.state.il.us)

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My needling starts with a need to build community

11/10/2018

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The other day I did this because it really needed to happen. All that gleaming new-campus architecture, surrounded by other gleaming buildings and gleaming buildings yet-to-come was begging for a little fuzzying up.

I did my undergrad at the old Emily Carr University of Art and Design campus which was decidedly less smooth and metallic and more crafty, situated as it was in the Granville Island artisan mecca on the ocean's edge. I liked running my hand along the old wooden posts carved with decades of scrawled text, and all the wiring and ductwork that in the last few years looked like a set out of Brazil. I miss the giant murals on the cement factory silos next door and the funky houseboats and the food stalls in the public market and Opus Art Supplies 30 feet away from the front entrance.

The new serene, clean Emily Carr building is surrounded by new and planned condos that most students could never afford, high-tech companies and, soon, an elevated rapid transit rail line. As much as I wanted to return for graduate studies, I was not convinced that I would be a good fit here, so asking for permission and access to the sign was a bit of a trial balloon for me. I got quick and full support for the idea and its installation, and now see this new white space as a blank canvas, ready for the next era of student artistic expression.

This is my first solo yarn-bombing foray. A bunch of us attacked the old school back in the day for a textile-themed student show but I have yet to meet my people here. So the Emily Carr Cozy is not just a balloon, it's a flare. Is there anybody out there?

As I busied my freezing fingers with the stringy stuff (in hard hat, on the Skyjack operated by design tech services maestro Brian) I kept an ear out for reaction. And it was good. Sharing the fuzzy intervention on social media (#craftivism, #subversivestitch etc.) reminds me that I am not alone in my need for needling authority. Indeed, this public performance includes behind-the-scenes connecting with my community of makers to collect their leftover yarn and thrift-store finds even before the main act. (You know who you are.)

Textile interventions in the public sphere have a way of provoking polarizing responses. Some love the often-chaotic hand-wrapping of colourful fiber; others view the crafty messing with architecture with disdain of all things cozy and crafty and engendered female. I liked the idea of having to wear a hard hat and working for four hours in a Skyjack, in the mode of construction workers in the immediate vicinity of my rapidly changing hometown, to complete my knitting job.

The reverse side of the Emily Carr Cozy, seen only from the interior of the school, is like the work behind the scenes in my making: chaotic, improvisational and maybe more interesting than the public side. (Carlyn Yandle photo)

A visual of the process, below. (All photos by Caitlin Eakins)

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Am I blue? Yes, and grey and silver too

3/29/2017

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“Your hair seems blue,” a friend noted over dinner.
It really is. I’ve joined the blue-rinse gang — emphasis on the blue. Denim blue is an unnatural hair hue that seems only natural now that I'm surrounded by heaps of old jeans and altering all those tones of denim. As usual, I’m not questioning why, but how: how to add some pleasing form to a traditional working fabric; how to infuse some lacy aspect into that utilitarian cloth.

What I do see is that after four months exposed to the bright colours of urban Mexico and the glare of the garish new Trump era, I am thirsty for cool, serene tones and patterns of rain-soaked skies and coastal stones rolled smooth by the sea. I returned to discover that I am, in fact, attached to the world of hot-water bottles, mugs of tea and toasty quilts, the coziness against the cold.

Blue is my touchstone: something real and eternal to cling to in these uncertain, unfathomable times. I may be seduced by sun-baked yellow, spicy red, lethal lime green and sunset pink but my deep, serene dreams are all denim blue.

(For a sample of my blue-jean fabrications, check out my other site, Workwraps.weebly.com)

Below: Recent experiments with denim include dousing doilies in bleach and imprinting them on on jeans before cutting for quilts.

Impression of two overlapping doilies on a pair of jeans.

Detail of the lacy traces through the bleaching process.

Samples of experiments with different dilutions of bleach, duration and fabrics.

A roll of quilt binding made from three denim shirts.

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Big painting shift at little house on the prairie

9/19/2016

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Day 12 painting: Embroidered details in a scene of a newly "thrashed" hay field.

I've just returned from a month in the big country of southwest Saskatchewan: big skies, big farming operations, big empty days that were all too much at the start of my artist residency at the Wallace Stegner House.

Suddenly agoraphobic, I pulled down all the blinds and paced around that lovely century-old house, wondering what on earth possessed me to throw myself into this imposing patchwork landscape. I am not a landscape painter; that's my dad's bag.

Plus I came by plane and an eight-hour car ride, so even if I did want to paint, I didn't have my usual large stretched canvases and totes of paints. I did bring a few of my usual travel essentials: embroidery hoops, needles and floss — and an old bed sheet. I knew there was just a couple of stores in town, and none would be selling art supplies so I packed a tiny travel set of liquid acrylics, a few brushes and a pad of mixed-media cardstock.

My sketchy plan involved, well, sketching with my father, who has spent some of every summer in this tiny town of Eastend ever since he filled the Stegner House with his landscape paintings 15 years ago.

We were quite a pair: me, not at all comfortable with the whole plein-air tradition, and him, increasingly unfamiliar with his life's work of painting that involved biking into the country to sketch then returning to his basement to paint in the heat of the day. (Actually we were mostly a trio, his wife acting as facilitator for whatever this was, supplying us with water bottles, sunhats, sketch pads and willow charcoal, and generally getting us on the road.)

We circled around this vague idea of mine as we circled around this dead-quiet, struggling little town every morning. But the awkwardness turned to anguish back at my studio as I undertook the tedious pursuit of finding some interest — or even the point — in painting puffy clouds and dun-coloured hills.

A week later and out of sheer frustration at my lack of landscape-painting prowess, I resorted to dropping diluted paint on a taut scrap of bedsheet in an embroidery hoop just to watch it bleed. I threw the first painted scrap away and did another, with a little more intention, then threw that away too. Within a couple of hours I figured out the right water-to-paint ratio to create a slightly controlled bloom with each stroke. A lot of other distracted behaviour (baking apple crisps, walking by the river, venting via text to my artist friends) meant that each additional stroke was added to a dried layer and by the end of the afternoon, a landscape was emerging on a miniature stretched canvas. That one I didn't throw out. But it was still a little hazy. That's when I thought about using my stash of embroidery floss for final line work.

I sat in the cool of the front screened porch that evening and embroidered some more information onto the painting. It was a clumsy first effort but soon I was enjoying the daily practice of biking in the morning with my father, painting something inspired by the ride in the afternoon, then embroidering some details in the evening, inviting others to join me for stitching sessions on the front porch.

I did this every day until I had 12 little paintings, each a progression from the last. I saw them as blocks for a future quilt, which led to a well-attended culminating exhibit, "Scenes from a Quilted Landscape."

But now I'm viewing them as something beyond a quilt and beyond the horizon. I'm calling them Points of Interest: something to build on and build with.

As with all creative pursuits, forcing solutions is futile. My original idea of coaxing my father back into his painting studio by getting him to share some of his process with me was a non-starter. These days he finds everyday joy in the moment, whether that is spotting a hawk while biking the backroads, playing a languid rendition of The Girl from Ipanema on piano in the hot afternoons, or watching the town's many cats on the prowl from the front porch of the Stegner House while his wife and I embroidered the summer evenings away.

I'm not sure if he knew it but he passed on to me the most valuable lesson for painting a scene: You have to actually see it.