Resting Stitch Face NYC was started by me (Carol Paik) and my daughter (Meredith Slifkin) in 2017.
I started making the stitch faces because I wanted to do something creative without having to sequester myself in a studio, and also because I had boxes full of scrap material that I’d saved over the years that I wanted to use up. Ironically, because of this project I’ve now acquired more fabric than I had when I started, but at least I also now have an excuse. I have a rule that the stitch faces must only be made of stuff that would otherwise be discarded. Each stitch face is a one-off, unique, label-defying individual.
After I had made a few, my daughter, Meredith, who is a photographer and filmmaker, and I thought it would be fun to photograph them around NYC, our home city that we both adore. Meredith initially did all the photography for the blog, but then she abandoned me to go to school and I had to learn how to use a non-cellphone camera. She still insists on editing the photographs whenever possible, and does her best to prevent me from posting mediocre-quality images. Once she left, I was faced with having to go around the city all by myself posing and photographing the stitch faces, which was super weird and not that fun: fortunately for me, dear friends stepped in to help. Resting Stitch Face NYC owes a great deal to all those wonderful people.
One of NYC’s all-time great places is The American Museum of Natural History. Quinn* calls it The Museum of The Oldest and Largest Things Ever That We Know About and Can Fit Inside A Building. It is a place that can make a person feel …read more
All over NYC people are making art, or at least trying to, and Thisbe, as an artists’ model, gets to watch some of them. The most challenging part of being a model is holding perfectly still for sustained periods of time. Thisbe’s quite good at …read more
In NYC there are these things called “pre-war apartments,” defined as apartments built before WWII. You know, the kind of apartments you see in movies like “Rosemary’s Baby.” Lorelei is leaving her beloved pre-war apartment. Here are some of the hallmarks of a pre-war apartment: …read more
Vivienne finds herself at a fancy event in evening attire. Of course, such things do happen elsewhere in the world, but only in NYC can they happen at the Pierre. Vivienne has a strange sensation of not being real. She feels like a character in …read more
Who comes to NYC in the middle of winter? Who stays here and thrives? Candace wants to know, so she throws on her binoculars and heads out. Winter can be tough in NYC: black ice, gray snowbanks, overheated apartments, bitter wind rushing up the cross-streets …read more
Marguerite, like all the stitch faces, is very interested in repurposing and recycling, and the Cooper Hewitt strikes her as a great example: a Gilded Age mansion repurposed into a design museum/fun house. Andrew Carnegie built his mansion from 1899 to 1902, having asked his …read more
January has more than its share of bleak mornings, and on this particular bleak January morning Hester decides only a pastry larger than her head will lift her spirits. For a stitch face, such a thing actually exists. The rest of us can only dream. …read more
Snow. Sand-spattered snow. Sand. Sky. Sea. And then: trash. Whitney first heard about Dead Horse Bay as a place where artists go to gather garbage that they then incorporate into their work. She was told that Dead Horse Bay was so named in the 1850s: …read more
