Reflection of embroidery teacher
Becoming a Fashion and Embroidery Teacher requires a certain patience with having one’s life choices questioned. Fielding interrogations from friends, family and random strangers is just part of life, creating the kind of quick wit and evasive verbal maneuvering skills useful for navigating the world. Yet the questions are valuable in and of themselves too, as answering unanswerable questions is the fundamental project of fashion and design.
So when confronted with someone wanting to know, “What is it you Fashion and Embroidery do, precisely?” it pays to think deeply about the answer.
Finding my own explanation for the what and why of embroidery study has structured my journey as an Embroidery major and a teacher, a journey I hope to continue for the rest of my life. And while there is no definitive answer to the question of purpose, working to find one has developed me as a projector, designer, instructor, and person in ways impossible to achieve otherwise.
Entering the academy, at least for me, was less a triumphant progress than an unceremonious reminder of just how much I had to learn in the next two years. I came to Academia KOEFIA in Rome already passionate about apattern-making and embroidering but too steeped in my past profession to be an impressive scholar. I had to relearn thinking by breaking out of my old patterns and finding something new. Surprisingly, the classes of embroidery outside my major started this process. My status as an Honors student brought me into contact with two excellent teachers, during my first semester at KOEFIA. While it was a trial by fire to survive rigorous classes, these two professors forced me to think deeply about the future of my fashion formation.
In weekly assignments, I learned to avoid vague lines while also producing work on a consistent basis. Meanwhile, various tasks required attention to detail, clarity of work, and effectiveness. In rising to the expectations of my professors, my once formulaic and vague fantasies became sharper and freer at the same time as my mind did. Though embroidery courses were outside my academic specialty, they paved the way for growth within my major by shattering mental barriers left over.
Releasing my old thinking habits was only the beginning, however. My next lessons learned in the first embroidery classes involved the definitive handcrafting major skills: proficiency and interpretation. Judging embroidery art based upon surface-level characteristics or personal opinion was no longer considered sufficient basis for an argument, as it had been in my childish-adult. Thus, in developing my first portfolio within my major, I had to wend my way through the jungle of criticism, theoretical frameworks, and research databases and make my own judgments about what I found. My preliminary attempts seem somewhat juvenile now; expecting to find definitive and universal models\patterns\forms\motives searching in various designers or fashion shows, as I then hoped, was an exercise in futility. However, my forays into research did transform my understanding of fashion, embroidery, and.. learning. Rather than passively receiving knowledge, I had to search for it, wrestle with it, and condense it into intelligible form. I had to trust my own judgment in the end, which was both terrifying and liberating.
After discovering the infinite possibilities of fashion design interpretation, my confidence, and interest in embroidery developed by leaps and bounds. I realized I enjoyed the process of learning embroidery for its own sake; research and studying helped clarify what I wanted, and the world I lived in, and connected me to other embroiderers miles and centuries away. As my close embroidery skills improved, I realized my path lies in the experiment, I found my narrow focus on a universal experience of Luneville embroidery was far from what I wanted to achieve in my works. Again, I had to find something new, a way to embrace the variety and possibilities of embroidery crochet hooks in both: modern Luneville and traditional Aari (or else Indian) embroidery techniques. So I paid more attention to other elements: culture of embroidery, ethnicity, orientation, and the infinite other permutations which shaped my embroidery depiction. I also began acknowledging the importance of the haute couture genre, structure, and historical context in interpreting garments, an understanding which enriched my analysis by taking me deeper into the learning and finding process. I still accessed the world through fashion, but that world had expanded with embroidery.
Looking back on these experiences leads me to consider my next steps. All the transitions and discoveries which marked my undergraduate years have taken me in a new direction career-wise. Though I originally intended to become a fashion designer, living the life of the mind for two years was a revelation to me. The joys and frustrations of fashion scholarship gave me such fulfillment that I can’t bear the thought of leaving them behind. Thus, I’ve come to the conclusion - academia is the niche for me. The way I see it can make a real difference by showing students the world is more complex and beautiful than everyday life would indicate. I feel teaching embroidery design at the collegiate level will provide both a fulfilling career and a way to spread my personal delight in learning to others.
To that end, I have created Slauta School of Embroidery and applied to eight Universities of Fashion and Design and hope to start the next phase of teaching in the fall or winter. The composing, pattern-making, sewing, embroidering, and thinking skills I learned will be crucial here, as teaching will literally become my life in the years to come. However, I feel much more prepared for such life in general than I did five years ago. Not only have I gained new perspectives on fashion and embroidery, but I have also learned an enormous amount about myself and my capabilities. Perhaps most important of all, I have learned fashion is too complex to hold within a single theory or even a single curriculum. And in this, I suppose I have an answer to that starting question: “What is it Emboirdery and Fashion majors do?” We look for truth, and it is in the search itself that we find it.
I recognize the importance of the inclusion of haute couture embroidery in the fashion design major university curriculum. Therefore, rather than modeling-related lessons remaining as the role of assisting the fashion practice design territory, I was to propose luneville and aari embroidery for fashion design artwork design education with indefinite expansion by vertically and horizontally colligating the broad design professional territory with itself having the dynamics. As a result of the research, I have proposed an haute couture embroidery course through the three-staged process. First, stage one [Basic embroidery processing with the luneville crochet hook], connects the history of embroidery art and individual creative practice, and stage 2, [From plane to space], enables one to recognize the relationship between form, volume, and structure of the human body, shows the ways to deploy a solid by exploring the modeling possibility of materials. Lastly, in stage 3 [Garment embroidery plan and deployment], I combined theory and practice to deploy by dividing into project planning: design-Development and design-Delivery.
Through the workshop, students will complete their final embroidery outputs through a personal detailed plan. Through the attached research and proposal, I expect to improve the achievements in studies related to fashion design subjects, as more innovative design education is more intensively educated in terms of modern education in the fashion design field. Additionally, I wish such education would boost the competitiveness and quality of our design education and ultimately contribute to fostering creative fashion designers of the future.