Fall in Love Project - The Red Dress

Hello to you!

How have you been since last week? I hope everything is going well with you and that life is good? Have you been able to stitch much this week?

Speaking of beautiful things, I'm going to be sharing a beautiful project that I came across on Instagram..an amazing stitching project that unites embroidery and female solidarity. This project caught my eye immediately and also moved me.

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The Red Dress

The project is simply called The Red Dress. 

The project started 10 years ago in 2009 in England. It was started by embroidery artist Kirstie Macleod and is centred around a red silk dress. 
She originally wanted to unite women through embroidery and break barriers of language, culture and race, but as you can imagine it has become so much more than that.
Every stitcher has brought her story to the dress and hundreds of women have become part of the red dress community.

Women touched by poverty, victims of war, or oppressed people who have been able to speak up by stitching on the red silk.

The embroidery part of the project is now complete but the next is about to begin.

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Some of the Statistics
The dress has travelled around the world being continuously embroidered onto by over 120 different artisans to date.

120 embroiderers, 28 countries

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Embroiderers include refugees in Palestine, victims of civil war in Kosovo, Rwanda and DR Congo, individuals in South Africa, Kenya, Japan, Paris, Sweden and Peru, upmarket studios in Bombay and Saudi Arabia, artists in Wales and Colombia alongside initiatives to support women in poverty such as Missibaba in Cape Town, South Africa, and FanSina working with Bedouin embroiderers based in the mountains above St Catherine's in Egypt's Sinai.

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The Next Step

The dress is now back in the UK and in the hands of Black Bark films. This girls only production team have been chosen to make a documentary covering the 10 year project to show the amazing community involved and to let the Red Dress tell it's story.

The artist Kirstie is planning on taking the dress to Mexico to meet the embroiderers there and show them the final result. 

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More Information

Kirstie and her team have organised a crowdfunding account to raise money for the documentary and travelling which you can donate to here if you would like to:  www.crowdfunder.co.uk/the-red-dress

If you would like more information about the Red Dress please visit her site here: http://www.kirstiemacleod.co.uk/thereddress/
and follow her on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/thereddress_embroidery/

Here is the link to a short film about the dress and future documentary: https://vimeo.com/389258493

I hope you enjoyed discovering this amazing stitching project with me and that it'll help inspire and motivate you to keep stitching?!

Have a great week full of stitches, colour and light! See you next week!

Happy Stitching
Melanie