Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi.

So, every year Pittsburgh has a huge art show called Art All Night, which is a super cool event because, as the name implies, it lasts for 24 hours but is open all night long, so you can go at any time that you'd like. It is a non-juried art show and anyone can submit one piece. It's pretty neat because you get to see art made by all kinds of different people, and while some of it is perhaps on the not-very-good side, I think it is an awesome idea to encourage artistic expression in the community. 

This year I decided I wanted to make something for it, and I wanted to stitch something. Prior to this, I'd never really used embroidery as an artistic medium, mostly just for stitching on clothes and such. So I came up with this design, but I wasn't sure what to stitch it on - for a while I was just figuring the standard cloth using a hoop as a frame, but then I remembered I had a box of vintage linens that Eric's mom got at an estate sale and gave to me. I'd been hanging on to them for a while, not really sure what to do with them. This piece worked out perfectly - I'm not entirely sure what it's supposed to be. It's about 13 inches tall by maybe 8 wide? It's a bit too rectangular to be a napkin or a handkerchief, but too small to be a placemat or a table runner. Maybe it's for setting on the arm of a couch or chair? I have no idea.

I really attempted to challenge myself with by creating this piece in ways like: 

1) I am not super great at drawing people. 

2) A lot of my embroidery work tends to stick to simple line drawings, so I tried to do different kinds of stitches (well, back stitch and satin stitch, mostly, but two is more than my usual one), with lots of colors and variations on the amount of threads used. In the end, part of me wanted to add even more stuff to it, but I worried about heading into the land of Too Much Stuff, so I decided to stop before I added something I didn't like but couldn't undo. 

3) Trying to work in concepts of shading and such to add some depth to the piece was tricky. Again, my stuff tends to be pretty simple, so it was a step up for me to add details like that.

I have officially titled it "This Is Our Most Desperate Hour," a line from Leia's holographic plea for help that the banner quote comes from as well. There's more detailed photos over on Flickr if you'd like to see more!