Moving the Needle with Embroidery Artist Sarah K. Benning

Let us follow the thread.

More precisely, the multitude of threads—aka embroidery floss. Fanned out in front of me, these colorful little skeins are the product of DMC, a famous French manufacturer since 1746, delivering 489 shades of possibility.

The filament in question is a silky shade of green, spiked through the eye of a needle that resembles a tiny saber, gripped with confidence by Sarah K. Benning, embroidery superstar. Benning, 29, has just delivered six hand-embroidered illustrations for The Washington Post’s end-of-year book recommendations. It was a tight deadline, and she was sewing round the clock.

And not for the first time. “I’ve pretty much worn my fingerprints away on my stitching hand,” she says.

We are ensconced in her cheery studio in Keene, New Hampshire, a space that feels more like a homey living room, with a cherry-red sofa that doubles as a giant pincushion. Plants engulf us. Scattered on the coffee table, bamboo embroidery hoops encircle still more plants—Benning’s hallmark. Prickly cactuses, plump succulents, ferns, and leafy philodendrons, crowding to the edges of the fabric. Others feature figures outlined in black thread, engulfed by jungle scenery. Pinpricks of Oriental rugs. Each image rendered in vivid stitches, one stab at a time, going out to a vast audience that includes half a million Instagram followers. There are no shortcuts.

In 2013, when Benning opened her first Etsy shop online, she was freshly sprung from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She’d fled to Albany, New York, where her partner (now husband), Davey, was in school; there, she found work as a nanny and began selling one-of-a-kind greeting cards that were drawn, collaged, and stitched. “I was a bit burned out [after graduating],” she admits. “It seemed like an easy way to keep making things and be creative but without making very serious art.”

Those greeting cards evolved into stitching on fabric but still mostly featured text or geometric patterns—until her houseplants began to die. “Our apartment was tiny, old, and north-facing,” she says ruefully. “The plants I moved in with didn’t survive that winter. As they died off, I started stitching memorial pieces. That’s how it all began.”

And that’s when she noticed interest was picking up on Instagram every time she posted these designs. When the young couple left Albany to teach English on the island of Menorca, off the coast of Spain, she took her business with her. And it blew up, in a good way.

“I think part of it was the narrative of us doing this wild thing, moving to Menorca and living this sort-of-idealistic bohemian life,” she says of her work’s meteoric rise on Instagram. “Reality wasn’t always that perfect; there were occasions that were very challenging or lonely, but they were great motivators for my work.”

Plus, the Mediterranean climate opened up “a whole new inspiration of landscape and plant life,” she says. Nostalgia also began to creep in. “I started incorporating more interior scenes—I was craving a homier space,” she explains. “We were living in a totally functional apartment, but it was furnished with cheap beach-style stuff. I started putting rugs and furniture into my work as a response to that.”

When the teaching gig ended, they were ready to find a place to settle down in the U.S., with a bona fide studio where Benning could continue doing artwork but also with room to contain their burgeoning DIY business: embroidery kits for do-it-yourselfers and digital PDF patterns. They looked in Baltimore (where Benning is from) but also in Keene, where Davey went to high school. This rambling 1873 Victorian, within easy walking distance of Keene’s downtown, was “love at first sight,” she says.

Last autumn Chronicle Books released Sara Barnes’s Embroidered Life: The Art of Sarah K. Benning, with enough luscious close-ups of Benning’s work to convert anyone who still equated embroidery with cross-stitch samplers. Benning uses the phrase “contemporary embroidery,” and there’s little doubt that she is bringing a fresh sensibility to a venerable craft.

“To me, these are illustrations in thread,” she says, picking up one of the Washington Post commissions, pointing out how she has portrayed the light source. It feels like a new direction to her, and it’s exciting.

“In my mind, embroidery was this very crafty activity. It wasn’t the same thing as art,” she says, remembering back. “Over time, those lines became super-blurry. Now I feel this is my artwork.”

To see more of Sarah K. Benning’s work, go to sarahkbenning.com.