|
|
61st Annual Woodlawn Needlework Show
Located in Alexandria, Virginia, the 2024 Woodlawn Needlework Show explores hand-stitched needlework in everyday life -- from mending to restore, renew, and reuse, to embellishing items that otherwise would go unnoticed; fine details on clothing and home goods, artwork in remembrance, or a blanket for keeping warm.
Debra's original hand-stitched artwork, Why Perpetual Foreigners? and We Are Individuals, Not Stereotypes are featured at the Woodlawn & Pope-Leighy House's 61st annual Needlework Show from March 1 - 31, 2024. Her artworks depict historical U.S. events that have influenced the cultural norms of her daily life and perhaps, of other Asian-Americans as well.
INTERACTIVE TEXTILES 101 GALLERY
AT THE TEXTILE MUSEUM
Located in Foggy Bottom of Washington, D.C., The George Washington University Museum and The Textile Museum opened a permanent interactive gallery called, Textiles 101 on January 27, 2018.
The Textiles 101 Gallery enables visitors to explore how fiber, color and structure influence how textiles are made and allows visitors to enter the mind of designers to discover the creative choices that influence textile design. Visitors can touch different fibers in raw and processed forms, practice various weaving techniques, examine completed fabrics, watch videos of artists at work and digitally design a new textile themselves.
Fiber artist Debra Lee was invited to create an eight-foot by 18-inch banner to illustrate the structure of looped stitches including knitting, crochet, simple looping and macrame for the Textiles 101 Gallery. Watch the video by Pamela Kaplan and Maria Helena Carey to hear about Debra's choices for the banner's design and see the steps involved to create it.
The looped banner hangs in the Textiles 101 Gallery along side of a woven banner created by fiber artist Hillary Steel and a felt banner created by fiber artist Renate Maile-Moskowitz.
TAKING THE STITCH CHALLENGE
In April 2020 Debra and several other hand-stitchers -- some new to stitching and some experienced -- accepted textile artist Julie Booth's stitch challenge to create samples for one or more articles in her four-part series called, Take the Stitch Challenge, for Quilting Arts magazine.
Julie challenged each stitcher to explore the potential of basic embroidery stitches to create interesting marks, textures and layers on fabric. Each challenge had a theme and a set of limitations. The result was a fascinating variety of stitched samples expressing the stitcher's interpretation of the theme created within the given limitations. To whet your appetite, Debra's stitch challenge samples are shown below. Click on the magazine cover to link to the Quilting Arts magazine!
