An offshoot of Cecilia Cornejo’s 2019 residency in Lanesboro featuring The Wandering House, The Embroidery Project is an ancillary endeavor that invites residents of Lanesboro to embroider fragments of the audio collected in town. Participants are given an embroidery kit consisting of a piece of fabric, embroidery floss, a needle, and a sentence. All the sentences come from audio snippets collected by The Wandering House in summer and fall of 2019 in response to the prompt I know I’m home when… Once assembled, the embroidered fragments will become part of a community quilt that functions as both a repository of the testimonies recorded and as a testament to creativity and collaboration. The plan is to exhibit the quilts at multiple venues, along with other projects coming out of the findings made by The Wandering House.

In order to participate, you will need to do the following:

1. Contact Cecilia Cornejo Sotelo at artelamilpa@gmail.com and let her know you would like to participate in The Embroidery Project—Lanesboro version.
2. You will be assigned a sentence based on your preference of sentence length. Each sentence has been numbered, from shortest (#1) to longest (#25).
3. Once you have received your sentence #, you’ll be connected via email to Lanesboro Arts to let them know that you are a participant in The Embroidery Project, and arrange a day/time to pick up your embroidery kit.
4. Before getting started, try a few different ideas on paper and do not hesitate to contact Cecilia with any questions that come up.
5. There will be a couple of virtual workshops for those who wish to participate but have little to no experience with embroidering.

There are a total of 25 sentences to choose from:

8 Short sentences

#1 to #8                                        Between 5 and 9 words                                  19 and 34 letters

11 Mid-length sentences

#9 to #19                                    Between 10 and 17 words                              41 and 50 letters

6 Long sentences

#20 to #25                                   Between 16 and 19 words                              60 and 97 letters

After picking up your embroidery kit from Lanesboro Arts and have started your project – feel free to stop by Cheryl’s Fabric Garden in downtown Lanesboro if you need any additional embroidery floss. Cheryl Lamon has generously offered participants in this project to use some of her embroidery floss that was a part of her mother’s collection. You can also find buttons and other sewing materials at Cheryl’s Fabric Garden as well.

For more information, please visit Cecilia’s website here.