Encoded Cloth -Hannah and Iris

For our Encoded Cloth Project, we created a map of our journey in life. This map was an abstraction of shapes and lines that was created with applique, hand stitching, sewing, and block printing. We used a various number of colors and illustrated this compare and contrast of Hannah’s life and Iris’ life into one image.

We separated the map into three parts, Hannah’s side, Iris’ side, and middle section of where we both met –Pittsburgh. We both interpreted our journeys in two different ways –Hannah decided to map out the states of her journey and include paths of where she is from where Iris decided to create landscapes of the journey from where she was born into her current hometown. For the middle section, we block printed an abstract path from a top down view of Pittsburgh because this is where we came together.

Finally, to tie in both journeys and Pittsburgh together, we included hand stitching with yellow string embroidery of a path from our lives into the intersection of the middle — the present — day. We’d like to think of this as a map/timeline, where each of our individual sections are more defined because it is something we know and in our past, where the middle section of where we are isn’t as defined because it is our present and possible future.