In January 2025, I found myself in the same rut that many of my students in the Data Visualization with Textiles class do by the third week: I'd been doing a lot of thinking about embroidery, and I had lots of ideas about what I wanted to do, but I hadn't actually done any embroidery in over a month. And, honestly, even while doing an 8-week embroidery class in the fall, I almost never did it outside of class.

A quip from Paula Curtis, a digital humanities / Japanese medievalist friend at UCLA, on the internet made me smile, and was enough to get me to pick up some new thread colors and some Aida cloth (which I'd never worked with before) and a little hoop, and I put this together in less than 24 hours, while also wrangling a kid sleepover and two playdates. It is very of the moment, as the fires are still burning in Los Angeles, but also has other resonances. From a #MultilingualDH perspective, centering a non-Anglo/Western Europe angle, I especially love the idea of taking yelling about bushido for granted as the sort of thing any medievalist would do. (Sadly, I was cheated in my Slavic medievalist education by an utter absence of bushido discourse.)

This was the first time I've tried to do much lettering with embroidery, and I can't say I loved it. It made me appreciate letters (particularly when working with Aida cloth) as rather fiddly little discrete shapes. Furthermore, I came to hate the letter e, which I know from text analysis to be the most common one in English.

For the samurai head, I combined some of the shapes for a helmet from The Noun Project (looking up "samurai"), and tried to add in the 🤨 emoji for the face, which seemed apt. The flames were chain stitch in three colors, and manipulating the chains to follow the odd curves, and to use that stitch as filler, was an interesting challenge.

If I were to do it again, I'd probably embroider "yelling" and "priorities" in a different color to make them stand out, and maybe do something more elaborate with embroidering the samurai helmet. But this was more embroidery than I'd done in a very long while, and I think it's done a lot to get me over the block in my head between theory and praxis.

Hand embroidery that reads in black 'I love yelling about bushido as much as the next medievalist, but priorities, man. - Paula Curtis, UCLA, Jan 11, 2025'. There's the head of a samurai embroidered and chain stitch on red, orange, and yellow as flames.