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9. Generative Embroidery
I first learned about machine embroidery from my good friend Luke Shannon. He had access to one during his time studying at Princeton and thought I might be interested in the medium given my obsessition with pen plotters and fascination of generative craft. I quickly found myself investing in a machine for myself - and so began my long journey into the world of textiles.
It didn't take long for me to realize that the available tools for creating patterns on these machines was either extermely expensive or inadaquate for my needs. The traditional software packages (think Photoshop for embroidery) are literally thousands of dollars just for the basic suite of tools. There is the wonderful open-source tool Ink/Stitch that runs on top of Inkscape - however I know Inkscape very well from my work with pen plotters and I am quite confident this is not the tool for me. Most promising is PEmbroider - developed during Endless March 2020 at the CMU Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry by Golan Levin, Lingdong Huang, and Tatyana Mustakos - it is absolutely an incredible tool and truly an acomplishment of its authors. However I found it frustrating to be bound to the Processing envrionment and lacking a lower level control of its outputs.
So I began work on my own library - Stitchjs.
I had never built my own library before so there was quite a lot of technical topics I had to brush up on - compiling, bundling, distributing. But once all that was out of the way I began to see my vision come to life. My first goal was to build a way to convert SVGs into proper embroidery patterns. Above you can see my first successful attempt with an output from a previous project of mine titled Streamlines. Seeing the machine stitch this out was one of the most exciting experiences I have ever had. Knowing that I had hand built this process end-to-end was both extremely satisfying and extraordinarily encouraging.
I then turned my attention to another passion of mine - looping animations. Insipired by the work of Huw Messie, TraceLoops, and others, I created the two animations below. Motivated by a project I was working on for the 2024 Art Blocks Marfa Weekend I created the animation on the left. And captivated by the hand embroidery work of Candace Hicks I created the animation of the right.
My appreciation and passion for this medium has only grown over the past two years. I continue to explore and experiment - learning new techniques and adding new features to the library. While it has been public and open-source since I began development I recently started encouraging others to assess and evaluate the tool. I am truly excited to see what others can do with it!