Slower than photography and more creative than painting, using embroidery to capture scenic vistas is a charmingly retro way to weave travel memories.
It’s every traveler’s worst nightmare: you arrive at your dream destination smartphone and selfie stick in hand, only to find your phone’s battery is as drained as your jet-lagged brain. What to do? If you’re Singapore-based textile artist and illustrator Teresa Lim, you’ll have your embroidery supplies on-hand and a great idea in mind!
Lim first found herself in that situation while visiting Perth, Australia in 2014. “I was at the beach and wanted to take a photograph,” states Lim, but dreaded dead battery syndrome manifested itself and Lim “decided that it would be great to embroider the scene instead”. The result? Some great embroidered scenes that are as beautiful as they are unique!
“Embroidering a place instead of taking a photo makes so much of a difference,” explains Lim. “When you take a photo of a place, you don’t notice the small details.” As even simple embroidery can be both time- and labor-intensive, noticing those small details goes with the territory. “After I complete a piece, I feel like I actually KNOW the place,” adds Lim.