For my second Studio 2 bridge project, I had to thrift a piece of clothing a rework it in a new way. Unsure of how I wanted to execute this project, I went to various thrift stores trying on different clothes until I found the cutest Brooks Brothers tie at The Cure. I didn’t know what I would do with it, but I adored the tie and knew I had to buy it. I love the tie and the neat colors that remind me of spring.
Then I had the idea to embroider something onto the tie, but again, I didn’t know how to even embroider or what I would embroider. I scrolled through my Tumblr blog and began writing down all my favorite quotes into a note on my computer. After I had amassed one long note, I was set on creating a list on my tie of things that make me feel happy like the tie itself. I started with pink thread, embroidering “sunshine” onto one of the spaces in the tie. I wanted to keep the embroidery synonymous with the form of the tie so that it looked continuous with the tie as a whole. I worked within the spaces between the colorful stripes in the tie, keeping everything elegant and as clean as possible. From sunshine came stargazing, then kisses, kindness, and darling.
I had no idea how long the embroidery work would take, and was quite overwhelmed by the work. Once I committed to the idea, I had to see it all the way through, so I stuck to the careful embroidery. I worked with sewing thread after ripping out the embroidery floss that I thought was too thick for the delicate tie.
For the presentation of the tie, I felt like I needed something for the tie to be supported on, so I created a collage board. I collected a bunch of images that remind me of certain feelings and auras, one of those being happiness like the list on my tie. I cut out each picture with my Olfa knife and curated the arrangement on a book board before gluing each one down. I glossed modge podge over the whole board so that all of the images sunk into one another and everything remained consistent.
