Series · 2019
In the beginning, there was a button. It was orange, slightly too large for its intended garment, and it had been sitting in a tin for eleven years waiting to be needed. When Julia Ocker found it rummaging through her grandmother's sewing supplies during a visit one winter she placed it on her desk, looked at it for a long time, and thought: there is a character in here.
That button eventually became one of the recurring objects in Stitched Together, the twelve-part series that Ocker developed for Cheese Sama over 2018 and 2019. It appears in the background of several episodes, sitting in a bowl near the window of the fabric characters' world a small, private continuity that attentive viewers noticed and that became, in some corners of the internet, something of a minor obsession.
The series is set in a world made entirely of textile. Buildings are constructed from folded felt. Roads are ribbons of grosgrain. The sky, on clear days, is a deep voile through which light falls in diffuse, soft columns. Into this world, Ocker placed a cast of characters made from fabric scraps a child sewn from striped cotton, an elder assembled from multiple generations of hand-me-down linen, a troublemaker whose jacket appears to be made from something that was once a curtain in a house no longer standing.
The series was conceived as a response to a quality Ocker had observed in her grandmother's relationship with her sewing tin: the way every scrap of fabric in it had a history, was connected to a garment, a person, a moment. "She could hold up a piece of cloth and tell you where it came from," Ocker recalled. "This sleeve is from your grandfather's work shirt. This trim is from the dress I wore to a wedding in 1963. There was so much memory in that tin. I wanted to make a world where that was true of everything where objects held their past without being defined by it."
Each episode of the series takes a domestic problem as its starting point a seam that needs repairing, an argument about who owns a particular piece of ribbon, a character who has grown too large for their stitching and finds in it something larger about community, inheritance, and the slow, patient work of holding things together. The comedy is gentle and consistent; the emotion, when it arrives, is earned rather than manufactured.
The animation technique used throughout the series was developed specifically for this production. Physical fabric swatches were photographed in different lighting conditions, then used as texture layers in the digital animation, giving the characters a tactile quality that pure digital rendering could not achieve. The movement of fabric in wind, the way a seam strains when a character laughs, the slight looseness of a stitch that is beginning to give all of this was animated with the kind of attention that is usually reserved for much more technically ambitious productions.
When the series concluded, Cheese Sama received more correspondence about it than any project in the studio's history to that point. A recurring theme in the letters was the feeling of recognition viewers who had seen their own grandmothers in the elder character, their own childhoods in the textures of the world. One viewer enclosed, with their letter, a small piece of yellow gingham. They did not explain why. It has been kept in a frame in the studio ever since.
Director: Julia Ocker
Production: Cheese Sama, 2019