So, when asked what are you doing – do you say “stitching” or “sewing”. Does one term have a different connotation than the other? My mother, Rose (Puglisi) Whall as a teen-ager was a stitcher in a shoe factory. She often told the story of arriving home after working in the shoe mill and being “invited” by her mother to sit and sew. She was the maker of family clothing that was needed for her siblings – many of these pieces were sewn on a sewing machine or stitched by hand. She obviously at an early age had that talent to be an amazing seamstress. I too, continue in that tradition of enjoying sewing and the meditative state that comes from repetitive hand stitching. All of my quilts are hand quilted with thousands of stitches. I’ve documented many of them by the number of stitches in the piece. My signature technique of hand quilting from the back of the quilt rather than from the top allows me to concentrate on the design lines of the fabric that I’ve carefully selected for the back of the quilt. This final layer of stitching allows me to create another design plane that adds the shadow lines to the quilts surface. The detail image shown above is from my “Yellow Series”. All of the pieces in this series were hand quilted from the back.

My more recent work, like this piece titled “Alone but not Lonely” was hand quilted from the top and the back of the piece – following the design lines of the fabrics. I’ve named the studio where I work “Smith Stitch Studio” – so I guess I stitch. So, what do you think, do you “sew” or “stitch”?