Needle Stitches Stories
Needle Stitches Stories
NeedleStitcheStories was a community-centered inquiry into hand embroidery as a creative and meditative collective practice. The project aimed to reintroduce embroidery to a group of participants through a series of workshops titled “Stitching and B****ing”, conducted over a span of three months.
The workshops were themed around nature, and participants were encouraged to create their own embroidery designs inspired by nature. My role as the facilitator was to guide, support, and step in when problem-solving was needed—allowing participants the freedom to explore embroidery in their own way. There were a few beginners and I had to teach them stitching.
A key aspect of the workshops was a fabric spread across the table on which participants could freely write their thoughts and feelings as they stitched.
This exercise turned into a surprising highlight of the series. Initially an icebreaker, the fabric soon captured the pulse of each session: reflections about stitching, snippets of conversation, song lyrics from the background, references to the IPL cricket matches—essentially a live documentation of the collective experience.
Participants wrote in their native languages, which resulted in the final fabric incorporating 11 different scripts: Tamil, Telugu, English, Malayalam, Sinhalese, Arabic, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, and Bengali.
At the end of the series, I stitched over all the handwritten feedback and compiled it into a large appliqué artwork approximately 3 meters in length. The final piece served as both a visual archive and a symbolic layer of collective memory.
The core intention of NeedleStitcheStories was to create space for interaction between the participant and the craft. Many participants shared that the workshops offered them a welcome break from their routine—a meditative space where they felt no pressure or judgment. They stitched for the simple joy of stitching, finding relaxation, connection, and creative fulfillment in the process.
– Priyaguna
