Miyuki Sakai

Miyuki Sakai's portfolio-Illustrations with a sewing machine using only thread.Wonderful sewn illustrations by Miyuki Sakai of various elements in the kitchen, dining room, table and many more. With endless patience and skill, Miyuki creates these illustration full of beautifully detailed textures and colors. Miyuki Sakai lives is an illustrator working with the sewing machine as her medium. She grew up in Osaka, Japan and is currently based in San Francisco.

 All images  Copyrighted by Miyuki Sakai

Faig Ahmed 

Born Baku, 1982 Lives and works Baku.Faig Ahmed graduated from the Sculpture faculty at the Azerbaijan State Academy of Fine Art in Baku in 2004. Since 2003, he has been working with various media, including painting, video and installation. Currently, he is studying the artistic qualities of Azerbaijani traditional rugs – he disassembles their conventional structure and randomly rearranges the resulting components of the traditional composition then combines these fragments with contemporary sculptural forms.

Through handmade craftmanship, multimedia artist Faig Ahmed creatively explores the ornate patterns and traditional designs of Azerbaijan carpets. He draws upon the culture and artistic traditions of the country in order to produce his unique and contemporary sculptures. By directly manipulating the wool, Ahmed transforms iconic carpet designs into modern creations.

He uses the formal, decorative arrangements as the basis for his work, but he then stretches and warps the colors so that they appear in a variety of unexpected forms that function as much more than just floor coverings.

All images  Copyrighted  Faid Ahmed

Michelle Kingdom

The Renaissance art and lavish elegance of the Valentino "Adam and Eve" dress gives way today to the no less beautiful, impressionistic embroideries of Michelle Kingdom, a teacher (and mum) in Los Angeles CA. The thickly laid threads pull shape and color into a very painterly style of story telling. They appear rough, sketched out, imprecise and wonderfully alive and sensual.

The LA-based artist grew up in a creative family and earned a BA in Fine Art from UCLA. But until recently, Michelle kept her vibrant, riotously lovely textile creations to herself.Michelle describes seeing her first piece of narrative embroidery in FiberArts magazine in the early 1990s. It struck a chord. “Figurative stories composed entirely out of thread – it felt like a direct link to my inner world, a medium tailor made for my secret thoughts.”

“My embroideries were almost like imaginary friends and I’ve only recently shown them to other people,” she says. For her, “embroidery became a very private form of art that I chose to keep to myself for many years. It was a refuge from outside influences, from judgemental thoughts that often sabotaged my attempts at painting.”

All images rights  reserved © Michelle Kingdom

Vladimir Denshchikov

Vladimir Denshchikov is an artist from Ukraine. He creates these religious icons using linen threads. Millions of knots are made manually by the artist during months of painstaking work. He has been practicing this technique for more than 30 years. It takes from 3 to 9 months to create an icon. Born on July 1, 1952 in Kiev, Vladimir Denshchikov graduated the Kiev Theater University and went on to become and actor. He worked his way up  to director and artistic director of the Simferopol Crimea Maxim Gorky Academic Russian Drama Theater, and since 2007 he has been teaching acting and directing at the Simferopol Institute of Culture. Quite an impressive professional career, but this national artist of the Ukraine is mostly known for his unique hobby – making incredibly detailed religious icons from linen thread, using a technique called “macrame”.

Only the faces and hands of the saints in Denshchikov’s icons are painted on canvas, everything else is made from millions of linen knots. The artist doesn’t use any tools, like needles or crochets to make the knots, all the patterns and details are created directly by hand. The material used for these incredible artworks is created by the artist himself: he takes a piece of pure linen cloth (a fabric associated with Orthodox Faith), soaks it in water and takes it apart one string at a time. He uses linen threads between 0.5 and 2 meters long and works between 3 and 6 months on a single 40×50 cm icon. It might sound like a long time, but let’s not forget one of these things numbers up to nine million tiny knots, each made by hand. (ref:By Spooky )

In 2007, Vladimir Denshchikov suffered a stroke, right before a theatrical premiere, which led to his taking a teaching job at the Simferopol Institute of Culture. While recuperating from this terrible condition, the artist continued working on an icon for the church of Malorechenskoye village, and as he struggled to weave little knots, he felt his partially paralyzed hand moving ever more freely, as if God was guiding it Himself. The artist made a miraculous recovery and continues to create wonderful macrame artworks.

All images rights  reserved © Vladimir Denshchikov