Who said embroidery’s a lost art?

If you can crochet, you can make an afghan. (Check!)

If you can knit, you can make a scarf. (Check!)

If you can embroider, you can decorate pillow cases, pimp up some linen guest towels, or create a work of art:

I hate to boast, but knowing how to embroider – how to cross-stitch, blanket stitch, French knot – has enabled me to turn my kitchen into a gallery, where I get to display this early oeuvre (c. 1957).

Oh, I haven’t embroidered anything in a while, so my skills may well be rusty – as rusty as the imprint on a linen dish towel if you leave the metal embroidery hoop on it too long in the evening dews and damps - but I’m guessing it’s like riding a bicycle, driving a stick shift, or blowing a smoke ring. Once you know how…

But what’s the reason to know how?

Knitting and crocheting are at least practical. Embroidery? Not so much. Who bothers to learn it? Who bothers to teach it?

Mothers these days drive their daughters to field hockey practice, use flash cards to improve their vocabulary so they’ll ace their SATs, help them identify a “passion” – real or fake – that will look good on their college app 10 years down the pike, encourage them to build their “brand.” Who has the time or interest to sit with their little girls on a perfectly nice summer day and show them how to place an embroider hoop just so?

Way too Ma Ingalls and Little House-y for today’s girls on the go.

Ah, those growing up years…it was kinder, gentler time (at least if you were straight, white, and middle class).

Anyway, I would truly have thought that embroidery is a lost art, other than in Burano (Venice) where it’s the thing.

But it’s not a lost art if you’re Michael-Birch Pierce:

Pierce is a fiber artist, fashion designer, and teacher at Virginia Commonwealth University. In 2010, while earning his master’s in fine arts at Savannah College of Art and Design, he landed a gig embroidering Christmas ornaments for the Obama White House and  discovered that instead of following a set pattern in the studio, he could take his sewing machine on the road for impromptu sessions.

Now, like a first-chair musician, he jets around the world to create embroidered, in situ portraits that he calls “stitchies”—or, stitched selfies—which he sews live, on-the-fly, as a kind of textile art performance piece. At $10,000 per appearance, he’s worlds apart from the stereotypical county fair caricaturist. “It’s not some party trick,” he says. “It’s an intuitive artifact of the moment.” (Source: Bloomberg)

First off, I’m in colossal awe that he’s so deft with the sewing machine that he can make works of art using one.

While I did learn to crochet, knit, and – of course – embroider, I never mastered sewing.

Oh, I can hem a pair of pants, sew on a button, and make a minor repair. But, unlike my sisters, who both became fairly skilled seamstresses, I can’t actually make something that can be worn by an actual person (or even hung on a curtain rod). The one item I ever completed – a dopey sleeveless shift in a ghastly cream, green, and purple calico print – could not, because of the unevenness of the yoke, be worn outside of the house. So I used it as a nightgown which, given the ghastly print, should probably have been its purpose to begin with.

Pierce is in a league of his own. (Check out his site. He’s pretty darned brilliant.)

That league lets him command that $10K per appearance fee. And he gets to work some pretty cool venues. He’s done NY Fashion Week, Art Basel, and:

At the SXSW conference in Austin last year, American Greetings commissioned him as part of its analog message of disruption.

First, there’s the stunning fact that there’s embroidery going down at SXSW. But I’m going do double down on that with the stunning fact that American Greeting (huh?) has a presence there.

Here’s an example of his work:

Okay, it lacks the primitive charm of my Will I Be Poached, Coddled, Hard Boiled masterpiece. But I have to confess that my litte work wasn’t an MER original. I purchased that design pattern, probably for a dime at Woolworth’s. Plus, afraid of running out of embroidery thread, I occasionally used one strand when I should have used two. So I do have to give it up for Pierce in terms of both originality and execution.

And I can pretty much guarantee that no one in the Rogers household wanted to watch me embroider, especially given that I generally ended up with pinprick holes in my fingers and a trace of blood on whatever I was working on. That’s not the case with Pierce:

Part of the appeal is the spectacle. The flamboyant, bald, bearded Pierce drives the foot pedal and spills abstractions into life via spool pin, bobbin, and feed dog. During a four-hour event, he can stitch about 75 portraits on five-inch-by-seven-inch fabric.

Gulp! I’m guessing that it took me four hours to embroider up the dish towel that now takes pride of place over my kitchen sink.

Not that I want a stitchie – at least not of myself - but I’m going to keep my eye on Pierce’s schedule. If he ever comes to Boston, I’d love to see this man at work.