Awesome Sewing

Just because your clothes have holes in them doesn’t mean you need to throw them away. Kiriko put together this bundle of Jessica Marquez’s craft tutorial book Make and Mend and a set of unique, assorted textiles for patching torn jeans, worn elbows, and other repairs. The fabric squares come in sizes from 3″ x 3″ to 9″ x 9″.

Textile artist Greg Climer creates quilts that look like pixelated photographs. After filming a brief scene of his friends kissing, he transformed them into a series of 36″ x 48″ quilts which he animated into a 3-second sequence. In total, he made 36 quilts from about 59,000 squares of fabric. It took him roughly five years to complete the project. (Thanks, Rusty!)

The Brick Wall has built some of the coolest and most functional LEGO machines ever. Their latest build continues to uphold that promise by giving us a fully operational LEGO sewing machine. It’s not as complicated as their other machines, but it took four months of experimentation to get it to work just right.

Process X takes us inside the Ishii Sports shoe factory to see how artisans create boots by hand. Each shoe starts by cutting shapes out of leather, refining its edges, then gluing and stitching the pieces together, adding lace rivets, and nailing it around a wooden form before sewing on its insole and attaching the layers of its sole.

Hong Kong-based artist Alfred Cheng creates incredible black and white portraits using sewing thread and a circle of nails. What makes them even more amazing is that he uses a single strand of thread to create each image. Art Insider explains his painstaking process.

Realm Crafts spent a full year working on this incredible cross-stitch, packed with all 151 first-generation Pokémon characters. While we would have loved it if the time-lapse had more in-between frames to show us, the artistry of the work more than makes up for it.

This incredibly creative promotional video for Japanese infrastructure company Kandenko is designed to send the message that “each person lights the future.” The sequences were created with a conductive thread called Smart-X which can be used to sew designs incorporating batteries and LED lighting.

Kyoto, Japan artist Ipnot creates some of the most impressive embroideries we’ve ever laid eyes on, sewing intricate images of food items. Among his designs is a photorealistic slice of pizza that looks like it has melted cheese made out of threads. Check out more of his incredible creations on Instagram.

Leave it to the crafters at Subversive Cross Stitch to create this timely DIY “Isolation Update” kit for tracking the number of days since you’ve last worn pants (or days without makeup, a bra, or crying) during the COVID-19 lockdown. Ideal for stress relief when you feel like stabbing something hundreds of times.

Breakfast created this incredible work of kinetic art that uses spools of thread to display images. It has 6400 individual spools, each of which can rotate between 36 different colors to display a single pixel. The trick is that the spools actually are loaded with a long multi-color belt, rather than individual threads.

If you’re in the field and need to stitch up something (or someone) in an emergency, Grim Workshop’s stainless steel card could be a lifesaver. It comes with a wide variety of needles and awls, along with four replacement buttons. No thread in your kit? Fishing line, dental floss, or paracord strands will do in a pinch.

Ornisi’s Darter is a tiny pen that manages to house an emergency sewing kit. Inside the outer shell is an organized brass sewing kit consisting of four needles, a bobbin with a 1m spool of thread and more space for threads.

Jonathan Chong and Clem Stamation’s music video for Husky’s catchy alt-pop track Ghost has the look of an animated cross-stitch. We’re guessing that it was done with computers, because we can’t imagine that anyone’s grandma could have sewn this much.

Embroidery does not easily elicit our admiration, but these surprisingly detailed and in some cases satisfyingly eerie hand-stitched illustrations from Etsy seller Sam Gibson are a good exception.

The name says it all. And though the price may initially go against your human logic, keep in mind that Etsy seller sewmuch2luv handmakes each of these 9-inch plush Spocktopi by special order.