For my unessay, I chose a quote from Middleton and Decker’s The Roaring Girl. The quote “ I have no humor to marry, I love to lie a’ both sides a’ th’ bed myself; and again a’ th’ other side, a wife you know ought to be obedient, but I fear me I am too headstrong to obey, therefore I’ll ne’er go about it” (page 23) has stuck with me since we read the work. Quite like my first project, I have made a piece of digital art. This one is a little more abstract than my first project, but the vision of it stuck so clearly in my head that I knew I wanted it to be the visual portion of my unessay.
At first I wanted to make a physical cross stitch, but I didn’t already have the materials like most of my other projects, and I also don’t have the time between all my other work for classes. What I do have is a drawing app, my hands, and a dream. Why I picked a cross stitch in the first place has to do with the strange train of thought I have. I was thinking about stereotypical activities that would be expected of a girl around the time the play takes place. My mind wandered to embroidery, specifically some images I’ve seen of little girls having to do a cross stitch, to which some strong-willed kids added the phrase “and hated every stitch” even though that undoubtedly added at least an hour of work. Moll, of course, would never willingly do something like sit and cross stitch, but I think that’s what made me think of the cross stitch in the first place.
I believe this image took me less time to make than a physical cross stitch would have, given that I haven’t tried to stitch letters yet. I found an image of cross stitch fabric that I used as my background, and wrote each letter as if I was actually stitching it. I outlined each “stitch” with a darker red color, and added shadows. The shadows aren’t very visible, but I don’t mind. There was a point where the outlines weren’t very visible, which I didn’t like, so I went back in and changed them. The letters are messy on purpose, styled after what I imagine it would have looked like if I had tried to cross stitch letters physically. There are some visible differences between some of the letters, such as the o’s and e’s, some being human error and others because I thought it looked cool. Overall, I am happy with the end result.
Moll as a character really intrigues me, she’s a strong willed person who knows exactly what she wants and doesn’t want. Simply put, she’s everything I wanted to be growing up. She’s not one to label herself, following the beat of her own drum whether it is making her boundaries known or dueling Laxton for even daring to believe that she is as easy as he believes. As shown in the quote, Moll knows exactly what she wants out of life and marriage isn’t one of those things, so much so that she won’t even play along with Sebastian’s scheme. If she even knows it is a scheme at all, given that Sebastian doesn’t ever inform Moll of his plan, let alone ask her to be in on it. In fact, I’m pretty sure that this scene is the first time the two actually interact at all. Honestly, Moll should have dueled Sebastian for insinuating he was in love with her.
Sprockets and Springes 