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Be Part of the Challenge

What is the Stitch-at-Home Challenge?

The Stitch-at-Home Challenge was conceived by San Francisco School of Needlework and Design (SNAD) as a way to encourage and inspire people to stitch. This is not a competition but a personal challenge. We provide the inspiration and you may use any needlework technique or combination of techniques in order to make a piece of textile art. Anyone at any level of stitching expertise may participate.

Each challenge culminates with an exhibition at SNAD. You can either mail us the actual piece or email us a photograph of your entry to be included in the exhibition.

HOW TO ENTER

Deadline to submit your piece: April 13, 2018

1. Read complete Rules.

2. Fill out Part 1 of our Entry Form - Here. This is a short form that helps us to keep track of how many participants we should be expecting.

3. Create your Piece. 

4. After completing your piece, fill out Part 2 of our Entry Form - Here. This part of the entry form asks questions about your piece (title, description etc.) and must be filled out if you want to be included in our exhibition.

5. Either mail us your piece or send us a photo by the the deadline of April 13, 2018 in order to be included in our Exhibition (see Rules above for details).

For challenge related questions, email snadchallenge@gmail.com

Who are we? We are SNAD, San Francisco School of Needlework and Design.

Learn more about us on our website.

Personal information will be shared only with those third-party service providers who perform functions on our behalf, including processing credit card payments, providing customer service, removing repetitive information from customer lists, analyzing data, and providing marketing assistance.

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The oldest surviving photograph made by a camera is a view from a window! Known as View from the Window at Le Gras, it was taken by Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 or 1827. 

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Open Window, Collioure by Henri Matisse, 1905

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Spring Fed, 1967 by Andrew Wyeth

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In this project, The View from Here, photographers from around the world were asked to photograph their view, once during the day and then once during the evening. 

This view is from Riga, Latvia. “As I take this picture, I can hear birds singing and wind blowing inside the vents. I feel happy.I love that I can see seasons change. In summer I feel every light breeze that brings the cool air from the waterfront. In autumn I watch the colors of the forest at the other side of the river changing. In winter I can see the river become slowly covered with ice. In spring I watch the ice break and the stream take it to the sea and trees next to my windows blossoming. My apartment’s windows face the river Daugava, which is the largest river in Latvia. It is about 800 meters wide at the point where my building is located, so all I see is a vast amount of water and a mixed tree forest on the other side of the river.As a northerner and introvert at heart, I love the fact that all I see everyday is nature even though I live in the largest city in the Baltic states.” 

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Below is an excerpt from Windows on the World by Matteo Pericoli. Pericoli created pen and ink drawings of views from 50 writer’s homes then asked the writer’s to reflect on their view. This view is from the home of author, Karl Ove Knausgaard. 

“I love repetition. I love doing the same thing at the same time and in the same place, day in and day out. I love it because something happens in repetition: Sooner or later, the heap of sameness, accumulated through all the identical days, starts to glide. That’s when the writing begins.

The view from my window is a constant reminder of this slow and invisible process. Every day I see the same lawn, the same apple tree, the same willow. It’s winter, the colors are bleak, there are no leaves, and then it’s spring, the garden is bursting with green. Even though I see it every day, I’m not able to notice the changes, as if they take place in a different time frame, beyond the range of my eye, in the same way high-frequency sounds are out of reach of the ear. Then the slow explosion of flowers, fruits, heat, birds, and insane growth we call summer is here, then there’s a storm, and the apples lie in a circle under the tree. The snowflakes melt the instant they touch the ground, the leaves are brown and leathery, the branches naked, the birds all gone; it’s winter again.

In my youth, I considered Cicero’s claim, that all a man needs to be happy is a garden and a library, utterly bourgeois, to be a truth for the boring and middle-aged, as far as possible from who I wanted to be. Perhaps because my own father was somewhat obsessed with his garden and his stamp collection. Now, being boring and middle-aged myself, I have resigned. Not only do I see the connection between literature and gardens, those small areas of cultivating the undefined and borderless, I nurture it. I read a biography on Werner Heisenberg, and it’s all there, in the garden, the atoms, the quantum leaps, the uncertainty principle. I read a book about genes and DNA, it’s all there. I read the Bible, and there’s the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day. I love that phrase, “in the cool of the day,” it awakens something in me, a feeling of depth on sunny summer days that hold a kind of eternal quality, and then the winds from the sea come rushing in the afternoon, shadows grow as the sun sinks slowly on the sky, and somewhere children are laughing. All this in the cool of the day, in the midst of life, and when it’s over, when I’m no longer here, this view will still be. This is also what I see when I look out my window, and there’s a strange comfort in that, taking notice of the world as we pass through it, the world taking no notice of us.”

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Astronaut, Scott Kelly, tweeted photos from the Space Station during his #yearinspace. This photo was taken of the Typhoon Soudelor on August 6, 2015. 

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Artist Marc Chagall painted many windows in his life. Not only paintings of windows, but windows themselves, in the form of stained glass. 

Above are two of his paintings, one is more of a literal landscape from a window, Window with View on the Island Brehat. The second painting, Lovers in an Open Window, is in the more whimsical style he was so well known for.

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Perhaps one of the most famous views from a window can be found in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, Rear Window.

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A painter of more than just surrealism, Salvador Dalí painted images such as Girl at a Window. The painting was likely made during a family vacation to Cadaqués, Spain. 

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Artist, Andy Goldsworthy has a knack for showing us nature in a way we couldn’t have imagined it before. Goldsworthy creates his art by going out into nature and then moving, piling or shifting natural objects into a new form. Usually, he simply photographs the pieces as a document and then leaves the piece itself to deteriorate or disappear with the passing of time. 

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A microscope is a type of window with a view onto a new world. Pictured here is E. coli under a microscope. 

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 A “natural window” in Arches National Park, Utah. 

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Georgia O’Keeffe opening the blinds in her home and studio. O’Keeffe is famous for her landscapes and images of nature. What a fabulous view for her to be inspired by! 

Read more about her home here.

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The Human Condition, 1935 by René Magritte

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In the photography series 'Out my Window' by Gail Albert Halaban, the photographer photographs her subjects from the outside looking into their homes, creating voyeuristic but intimate portraits. 

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Sandcastle by Calvin Seibert.