Mostyn Griffith, a lanky freshman with a mad scientist coif and thick-framed, black glasses, pins a creased rectangle of muslin to the classroom wall. Next to him, Tess Wagman, a pre-Raphaelite blonde in an Eeyore shirt, puts up her own muslin scraps. She glances at Griffith's work – a gold and cream abstraction with the words "Is this real life?" running alongside in satin stitches – and points: "This kind of looks like a funky mushroom."

In the meantime, Griffith is struggling to perch a canvas thick with gesso-soaked embroidery from a flimsy set of thumbtacks. Eventually, Griffith gives up, handing the thread painting to the waiting arms of his instructor – a dapper man in a blue-check button-down shirt open at the collar, with a neatly trimmed beard and a thick mustache waxed up at the ends.

The latest "crit" in textile artist Michael Savoia's digital embroidery class at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence is well under way. The students – a baker's dozen of undergraduates and graduates in a diverse range of disciplines from jewelry to architecture – are gathered in a loose semi-circle around the front of the classroom, ready to discuss their latest explorations with the medium.

Savoia has been teaching the class for the last three years, ever since he uprooted his high-end embroidery company, Villa Savoia, from West Hollywood to a studio in the heart of Providence. His work has been featured in publications like Architectural Digest, and his client list includes Thomas Pheasant and The Wiseman Group; despite a long and lauded career in the embroidered arts, however, Savoia still finds himself regularly wowed by the intuitive leaps his students make, as they transfer their digital savvy to needle and thread. "After just two days in class, I was bowled over by what they've done," Savoia says. "This group is particularly adept with [digitizing] software."

For Savoia, it's crucial to educate the next generation of influencers in the apparel and design world. Otherwise, he says, the embroidery industry will never evolve or grow. He wants his textile students, in particular, to have an awareness of the medium when they enter the workforce and start landing jobs at top apparel companies like Levi or Nike. "When more people understand embroidery, it'll raise a call for a finer product in the marketplace," he says. "They'll insist on it."

Other industry professionals echo his sentiments. Jay Fishman, owner of the Wicked Stitch of the East, a digitizing firm in Cleveland, believes it's important to get art students excited about the possibilities of the decorated apparel industry, showing them how it can be a lucrative career choice for a creative professional. "Embellishment opens up a world of possibilities for students as they learn about working in different substrates," he says. Fishman has given lectures to college students, educating them about the history of embroidery. "It's important to me to keep this industry going for years to come," he adds. "I teach our history and speak in terms of the future."

Securing the Future

Securing the industry's future is one of the reasons Stitches helped RISD establish its embroidery program several years ago, procuring a Tajima machine at a reduced price from Hirsch International. Initially, the school hired Joyce Jagger, The Embroidery Coach, to provide three days of onsite training on the equipment. Eager to share his expertise, Savoia was later hired to teach a five-week digital embroidery course each winter and lead independent studies the rest of the academic year.

Savoia's month-long class begins with an accelerated overview of digitizing software and the care and feeding of the embroidery machine. Savoia gives students a primer in various stitch types – from steils to complex fills – and then turns them loose to experiment with their newfound knowledge. "I like the creative aspect that the students bring and how they can instruct each other through their pieces," Savoia says. He tries to steer his students away from the expected, asking them to abandon "all preconceived notions of what embroidery is" and start from scratch. He's particularly disdainful of replicating what's readily available in the commercial world. To students interested in creating military-style emblems and patches, he sniffs: "Do you really need to recreate something that you can buy for $25?"

During the classroom critique, however, Savoia is generous with praise, gently nudging his students to see their mistakes and dispensing advice on how to tweak their designs to best represent their artistic vision. Consider freshman Tristan Hsu. He pins two unfinished pieces to the classroom wall for review: One depicts a crowd of people, all clad in orange robes. From afar, the embroidery resembles flames more than figures. "This one is really lush texturally and beautifully colored," Savoia says. The second is a sort of triptych, showing a woman sitting next to a potted plant in the leftmost panel. The other panels are a sea of blue, with pink cross-hatches emanating from the top corner, like a branch dripping with cherry blossoms. "I'm trying to use the machine and software to go for a more illustrative feel," Hsu says. "I imagined how I would run the direction of lines and shading if I were drawing it by hand."

Classmates like how the second piece resembles "one of those three-panel church paintings that tells a story" and admire Hsu's control of line and ability to create small shapes. To Savoia, the embroidered artwork "almost has a quality of hand," looking more like hand-stitching than something run through an industrial machine. "It's an elegant little thing," he says.

Still, there are issues: Hsu created the seated figure with a complex fill used as a bi-satin, rather than treating each shape individually in the software for more control, Savoia says. Hsu also learned the importance of pathing: A thin, dark line cutting across the blue sky in his design is attached to the embroidery, and not just a stray thread caught under the machine. Clicking the proper box under density settings would have routed the thread along the outside edge of the stitching, rather than down the middle of the field. "I just completely forgot to change the settings," Hsu says, adding that it took him about four hours to sew out his two pieces, thanks to plenty of thread breaks. "I started over a lot."

Addressing Problem Areas

Savoia expects the students to forget much of what he's taught them in those introductory embroidery lessons, which is why the class is less lecture-focused and more self-directed and hands-on. When a student runs into a problem, however, Savoia is there to help, as he is after the critique when graduate student Emily Grego is trying to figure out the trouble she's been having with her sew-outs. Grego, a jewelry major, has been translating her jewelry designs into embroidery, and ran several unsuccessful tests of an elongated pendant in yellow and gold shades. Much of her jewelry is created using 3-D printing technology, and Grego says she found it a fairly easy transition between the software used in each discipline. The hardware, on the other hand, has given her pause: "I had a lot of problems with the tension and the density of the machine."

While the other students retreat to their computers to flesh out their final projects, Grego and Savoia head to the small adjoining room that houses the embroidery machine. The sleeves of her oversized, off-white sweater pushed up, Grego hoops a swath of muslin and loads it under the 15-needle machine. When everything is ready, she steps aside and turns on a bright swing-arm lamp, giving Savoia space to hunch over the embroidery machine. He fiddles with the black knobs at the top: "First problem," he says a few seconds later. "The thread's not under the tension knob." He makes a few other adjustments, and Grego's piece sews out with ease.

It's a common issue, Savoia says after giving the rest of the class a quick refresher on rethreading the embroidery machine. "I have to retension the machine every week. It's kind of exhausting," he adds. "Tension is one of the hardest things to understand and conquer. I struggle with it myself."

Despite those small frustrations, Savoia is in his element in the classroom, guiding these beginner embroiderers to greatness. And, he notes, he learns as much from his students as he hopes they're learning from him. "Some of the stitch combinations that they instinctively put together have been instructive for me," Savoia says. "Everyone is informing each other."

THERESA HEGEL is a senior staff writer for Stitches. Contact her at thegel@asicentral.com and follow her on Twitter at @TheresaHegel.

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