For a final project in Data Visualization with Textiles 2024, Nancy Hoang embroidered leaves on a dress, using Class Data and the property of size.
For my final project, I made a dress that doubles as a timeline of my years at Stanford, using embroidery to visually represent my academic load over time. The data came from my own course history, where each millimeter of embroidery represents one unit, translating the number of units I took each year into physical lengths on the dress.
For the embroidery, I chose a fishbone stitch to create leaves, with each leaf symbolizing a year at Stanford. The length of each leaf matched the units I completed that year, and I picked bold thread colors to stand out against the cream fabric of the dress, making the design pop. I decided on a fishbone stitch because I really liked how it looked like waves, especially after finding the gradient tread from the GSE makery. One interesting thing I saw as I finished up was how short my co-term leaf was in comparison to the rest of the years where I was allowed double the units. I also noticed my sophomore year and senior year leaf being larger since that was when pass/fail happened and when I got into graduate school with only one year of funding. It was interesting how each leaf seemed to almost represent my emotions more than the units since the units were so reflective of that.