June 2014 - ChipInHead.com

A few years back I participated in an event with Madison Young’s Femina Potens gallery. It was a DIY workshop where we sat in a garden behind a yoga place on Haight St. and did handwork. There was a wonderful redwork artist there who refreshed my memory on how to embroider, something I did a lot as a little hippie teenager. So when I shut my portraiture business down, I took up handwork again. This time I had a wonderful helper: Pinterest. Reference photos, tutorial gifs, inspiration boards. Heaven.

Here are some of the things I’ve made- the octopus is the oldest and is all wrinkly cause I hadn’t got the hang of using the hoop yet.

Embroidery by Suzanne Forbes

I like to make things when I’m not working as a commercial artist.

Fiddly things. The last time I took a hiatus from working as an artist, it was food. This time it’s handwork and sculpting. This time, there’s Netflix, which is the craftperson’s best friend. These are commercial corsets i bead-embroidered, appliqued, sequined, embellished with Swarovski crystals and embroidered with metallic threads.

The top one is actually green underneath all the “gack” (costumers’ technical term); it’s an OC 511, from the good folks at Orchard Corset. I modified it by adding sewn-in hip gores of heavy dark teal brocade to increase the hip-to-waist ratio.