I’m so excited (and I just can’t hide it)…

If you know me you probably know that I don’t get all that excited very easily; half a lifetime in the art world leaves some marks. It isn’t that I don’t like stuff a lot, but excitement just doesn’t come very easily after making about a million things and seeing about ten million… You might call me a bit jaded.

That said I am really freakin’ excited about the fact that I am going to be doing some stuff with Janome. Yep, you heard me. And I don’t take this kind of thing lightly; my name, voice, and reputation matter a lot to me, because in the end they are really all I have. Luckily I’ve been sewing on Janome machines since I started in this world, so when we started talking about doing some stuff together I was all yippee and stuff like that…

So, over the coming months I’m going to be giving myself a crash course in machine embroidery. I’ve been thinking about getting into this for a while, and developing a relationship with Janome happened at just the right time. You see, more and more of my ideas have been pushing up against the limits of possibility, or at least plausibility, when it comes to the human hand. I’m pretty sure at least one of my quilts for the book pushed Lisa to the edge of tears. So, computer-aided stitching is the perfect avenue for me to explore some of those ideas.

It isn’t that I am leaving the human hand behind, but I also don’t want the physics of human capability to be my limit. Heck, I’ve been using computers and advanced technologies to facilitate my work since the mid-90s; machine and tool shops became my best friends for a quite a while. For me this isn’t about making what I could do by hand easier, but exploring avenues that my hand (or possibly any hand) could never manage.

And that is what has me so excited, that opening up of new vocabularies, because for me making has always been about the ideas, everything else is a matter of picking the correct tools. Whether those tools are guided by my hand, someone else’s, or a computer always depends on the piece.

So, hooray for another way to make, to get another set of ideas out into the tangible world. And yay for continuing my love affair with my Janomes!!!

Now the only thing left to decide is which one of these designs I should translate into embroidery first…

a] Intertessellation…
thomas-knauer-sews-janome-3

b] An Eye for an Eye (only makes the whole world blind)…
It’s one of my favorite Mahatma Gandhi quotations
thomas-knauer-sews-janome-1

c] Panopticon…
thomas-knauer-sews-janome-4

d] Regarding Planet Earth (in hobo signs)…
thomas-knauer-sews-janome-2

Which one do you think I should do first? I want to do them all, but one of these has to be the very first one. Give me a hand in choosing…

-t

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