Sew Much Fun
P.Nosa is the artist featured in this video. He developed a portable sewing machine table powered by a solar panel (or a bicycle electric generator which makes for great sewing on the go). These free-hand embroidered designs closely reflect P.Nosa’s drawing style and if you look through some of his work you can almost see the natural transition from traditional drawing and painting materials to this odd but unique sewing method. The video proves he has mastered the art of drawing free-hand with a sewing machine.
A few days after seeing this video, a Converse advertisement on the back of a Rolling Stone magazine caught my eye.
The branding of Converse One Star focuses on the actually stitching of the fabric. The ad uses a straight line stitch to create borders, dividers and even some of the typography. It is hard to tell, but with a close look it appears the borders and dividers are actually a computer generated stitch, as opposed to a true stitch created by a sewing machine. However, I am unable to determine if the lettering is truly stitched or computer generated. I want to believe it is truly stitched but between the star inside the “O” and the circular target logo I am becoming more and more doubtful that this was hand stitched. Curious about this “sewing” trend, I wanted to know just how difficult it was to create letters using a sewing machine…Below is my attempt.
Now, I will admit, I wrote a stencil for each letter of “GDBD” on the fabric, so I could follow it on the sewing machine. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be and with a little more practice I bet I could become pretty decent at sewing letters. However, I can guarantee my letters would have come out a lot sloppier without the outline to trace! Unfortunately, I didn’t have the patience to try a more free-hand attempt, my threads kept getting all caught up in the machine. I would love to try P.Nosa’s sewing machine invention but I am discouraged by how close that needle gets to his hand!