Following the Line:

Following the Line begins with slow looking, the practice of “taking the time to carefully observe more than meets the eye at first glance.”¹ Through close attention to textile structures, surfaces, gestures, and traces, the project treats looking as an active form of learning. Lines are followed as stitched paths, drawn marks, structural threads, folds, repairs, and records of touch. They move between surface and structure, reminding us that “threads can be transformed into traces, and traces into threads.”² 

A line of fiber can be clustered and twisted to create thread.

Threads can be plied together to create yarn.

Yarns can be interlaced to create weaving.

They can be interlooped to create knitting or crochet.

They can be intertwined to create lace.

To follow the line is to trace the path from fiber to form, revealing how fibers become structures, how techniques become traditions, and how much wonder can be held in a single thread.

Following the Thread Lines: An Exploration of the TRC Collection

This Object Study offers a beginning point for learning how to follow the line. Rooted in the hands-on experience of the Textile Resource Center, this project grew from a desire to understand textiles by spending time with them directly: looking, touching, noticing, and tracing how their structures come into being. It reminds us that every textile is made of lines at many scales, from individual fibers to threads, from threads to cloth, and from cloth to the objects we hold, study, and remember.

Look closely and slowly: What do you see?

Explore examples of these structures from Object Studies

Interlacing/ Braiding

• A Weaving Made of Braids: Igshaan Adams’ Upheaved

Interlooping/ Crochet

• Finding Value in the Everyday: Crochet Ducks, Kitsch, and Synthetic Yarn

• An Interlooping Account of Language and Meaning:  Star Anise and Xiaoshan Lace

Intertwining/ Lace

• I Taught Myself How to Make Venetian Needle Lace

• Coiled Lines: Rwandan Basketry, Memory, and the Agaseke

Interlocking/ Knotting/ Connection

• Knots, Tangles, and the Ways We Make Connections

Embroidery

• But Is It Really a Towel? An Analysis of Turkish Embroidered Textiles

Pieced/ Dimensional

• A Cap, a Kippah, and the Archive: Bukharian Jewish Textile Memory

Keep Following the Line

Every textile begins with a line, but no line stays simple for long. 

It twists, loops, knots, crosses, gathers, holds, and remembers. 

What else can a line become?