Intricate embroidery can be spotted everywhere—from being on clothing, to shoes and art pieces and even home decor. It’s a form of wearable art, and a method through which artists can reveal their own sense of style. After all, it’s all about the creative details. Skidmore’s own Embroidery Club, newly started this year, wants to stand out through their own details. Hoping to become chartered soon, the Embroidery Club strives to create a welcoming community where students with varying degrees of experience can try their hands at embroidery.
Sally Apolinsky ‘20 and Lucy Beizer ’19, co-presidents of the club, plan to teach students that all you really need to succeed in embroidery is a needle tool, fabric, thread or yarn and a sense of creativity.
“A lot of times, people make the design on the hoop and then sew it onto whatever they want, or sometimes they sew it straight on a shirt,” says Beizer, who has been embroidering since high school.
Amelia Pinney ’20, a member of the club, explained how “embroidery has a lot to do with texture, so you can do the normal flat stitches, or you can do knots on top of knots to make things like flowers look three dimensional. [You can also] add beads. There’s so many unique ways to do it.”
Pinney began making embroidery in her senior year of high school and fell in love with it during the summer before coming to Skidmore. She had a project senior year where she was given art as a subject and had to take a portrait of her friend in as many mediums as she could. “I did painting, drawing, sculpture, and I thought ‘Why not embroidery?’ After that, I began doing it everywhere I went.”
While Pinney, who has gone on to experiment more with embroidery in her free time and through taking arts classes here at Skidmore, may be a bit of an embroidery expert, the club stresses that it welcomes students with various degrees of experience to join.
“In every single meeting we have, people start by not knowing what to do and by the end they’re making something,” Beizer said. “We’re doing this club so people can learn, and I hope that people who don’t know how to do it will come.”
The club exists for all students—from the presidents, to beginners—as a fun way for people to get together and embroider. However, the executive board is still working to get formally chartered in order to purchase needed supplies. According to Beizer, the charter process includes having “to write about what we are doing and present it to a jury, SCC, and then they vote on whether or not we can become a club.” Currently, the club provides the materials themselves, from thread, hoops and needles, to beads.
Chartered or not-yet-chartered, the club provides an inclusive and artsy environment for all to enjoy and experience, as Pinney promises: “People can just come and we’ll give them advice and we’ll teach them how to sew and stitch.”
Embroidery Club meets every Monday from 7-8pm in the Saisselin Art Building, Room 101.