Background:

I first discovered Turtlestitch when Andrea Mayr offered a day long workshop at the Scratch2015AMS conference in 2015 and I immediately fell in love. The idea of coding my own designs, stitching them and having them to wear and use everyday was fascinating! I had grown up with a love of garment sewing and embroidery from childhood and a great appreciation for the history and culture of sewing. As a young artist, I joined numerous embroidery guilds and practiced every kind of embroidery from traditional Japanese silk embroidery to Danish counted thread to Blackwork, popular in the 16th century and seen in garments worn in many famous portraits of the time.

Being online became part of my everyday life working in a school library and I had always wanted to learn more. I had started coding in the early 90s when I ran one of the first searchable databases of sites for, about and by women. The programmers held the power and generously taught me! I did learn but in bits and pieces and now I saw a great opportunity to combine sewing and coding with Turtlestitch.

Pilot Phase 1

In phase 1 of our pilot, Simon Mtabazi in Tanzania and Susan, (erhsnyc.org) in New York City, both referenced the Beauty and Joy of Computing (bjc.edc.org) and Turtlestitch cards (http://www.turtlestitch.org/static/download/TurtleStitch-Cards-Beginners.pdf) to explore the relationship between traditional kanga patterns and coding designs inspired by them. Students used Turtlestitch (turtlestitch.org), developed and based on the programming language Snap!, which grew out of the programming language Scratch, developed at MIT. The designs were shared and developed by students in both classes and embroidered by hand on heavy paper with embroidery threads. Students in Tanzania showed the textiles and read and translated the Swahili inspirational phrases on the textiles for the New York City students.

Pilot Phase 2

In phase 2 of our pilot, Suzanne Coley, (http://suzannecoley.com/) book and multimedia artist joined both classes (Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and New York City) and coders in Nairobi, Kenya with Max (http://www.usiu.ac.ke/study/academic-affairs/school-of-graduate-studies-research-and-extension/140-i2c2/appfactory) to bring artistic insight to the project. She shared her handmade books, talked about art and personal narrative and shared stories of using textiles and hand embroidery in her book pages. After four days in residence in New York City and two Google Hangouts with Africa, Suzanne will continue to instigate and engage in aesthetic conversations about digital embroidery and textiles as personally expressive pieces of art and communication.