Filara

Filara is a program I wrote that embroiders. Each piece is a square of cloth worked edge to edge in thread. The ground goes down first, row after row of stitches following the lie of the piece, and then the motifs are laid over it in satin fill, French knots, stem stitch and running stitch. Every stitch is drawn the way a stitch sits on cloth: a shadow under it, a highlight along the top, a little sag in the middle, and a slightly different colour from one strand of floss to the next.

I write the code, and the code makes the pieces. There are five series so far. Garden Sampler is bouquets, wreaths and scattered sprigs on worked linen. Topographic Relief is a contour map stitched in stacked bands of satin. Koi Pond is fish in the classic colour patterns over stitched water, with lily pads, ripples and now and then a heron. Aviary is birds over a worked sky, in skeins and scattered flocks and reed marshes. Misprint lays one series over another and burns holes through the top, or splits the cloth along a seam into panels of different prints, with every edge scorched.

The parts of a piece respond to each other rather than being placed one by one. The koi swim as a school through a current, and the water is stitched along that current. Stems in a bouquet grow toward a light and steer clear of one another, and a flower opens only where there is room for it. Birds in a skein each look for the slot behind the bird ahead. The direction of the thread follows the form, the way it would if you were sewing it, because that is what makes stitched cloth read as cloth.

Every piece comes from a sixty-four digit hash. The same hash in the same series gives the same piece anywhere, down to the last stitch. Pieces come in editions of thirty, and edition four of Koi Pond is always the same thirty pieces. The difficult part was never one good piece. It is writing a program that only makes good ones, so the thirtieth piece of an edition I have never looked at holds up next to the first.

As the program draws, it records the path of the needle. A piece can be exported as a stitch plan and sewn on a home embroidery machine, in the same colours, in the same order. So what is on the screen is not a picture of embroidery. It is the pattern, and the picture is just the pattern shown.