Students at East Providence High School got to experience the complex, interweaving threads of history in a very literal way on Monday, and got to add their own stitch to the fabric of America’s 250th birthday while they were at it.

Throughout the day, students in all grade levels partaking in the Career and Technical Center’s fashion design career pathway got a lesson on how to stitch a tapestry from Karen Katin, a Portsmouth resident and professional fiber artist who is the state director for Rhode Island’s contribution to “America’s Tapestry”, a collaborative art project where the 13 original colonial states will produce a 3-foot by 5-foot hand-stitched tapestry depicting important historical events from each area, known as a narrative embroidery.

Part of the nation’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of its founding, Rhode Island’s tapestry will ultimately be joined by the dozen others (each individually framed, not joined together like a quilt) to create a visually stunning art piece that will then travel around the original 13 colonies for display.

Lots of lessons — historic and artistic

Rhode Island’s tapestry contribution includes three main components.

At the bottom, members of Rhode Island’s First Regiment — including white, Black, and native soldiers — fight in the Battle of Rhode Island.

“There were Native Americans and there were slaves who were freed and everyone was paid the same as their white counterparts, which was kind of a novel idea for back then,” Katin said. “The Battle of Rhode Island is the only skirmish that happened in our state during the American Revolution, and it actually happened in Portsmouth, which is where I am from and where the studio is and where the bulk of the stitching has happened, which is kind of cool.”

The top-right panel depicts the sloop “Liberty”, which was owned by Boston merchant John Hancock before being taken by the British Navy in what colonists saw as the most recent in a series of oversteps by the Crown. In 1769, while in Newport, it was eventually boarded by angry colonists, dumped of its materials, and set on fire in one of the earliest acts of aggression by perturbed colonists prior to the Revolution.

In the top-left, three historic buildings depicted together on a fictional island; each was established as a hospital by the French in 1780. One is the Baptist church in Newport, another is University Hall at the College of Rhode Island (now Brown University), and the last a home in Poppasquash Point.

The stop to East Providence High School was unique because it was the last time the tapestry will travel outside of Katin’s studio space, The Stitchery, where a bulk of the work has been done by hundreds of volunteers over the past year. Students got to add stitches and learned of the various ways in which Katin and volunteers have had to adjust in order to get the large tapestry done by its deadline on April 30.

“It is intended to have been entirely stitched, which is a large project,” Katin said. “A square inch of embroidery takes about an hour. The entire panel would have taken well over 1,700 hours.”

Instead, Katin and volunteers have utilized many different methods, including painting the background of each scene, using black suede fabric to reduce the labor burden of hand-stitching each of the letters in ‘RHODE ISLAND’, utilizing slip stitches with friction pens, and using a real piece of dyed rope rather than trying to stitch one from scratch.

For the actual stitch work, Katin showed the students how different materials were used to depict different types of materials, like clouds and wooden ship boards, and how different types of thread could depict different vibrancies of color, or make objects appear to sparkle.

“So, you can see it's kind of turned into much more of a mixed media project,” she told the students.

Volunteers still needed

Nina Voccio, who instructs classes for the fashion design pathway, said that she first got inspired by the tapestry project when it came to her local library in Cranston. She did some stitching herself and through she’d reach out to Katin to see if she could bring some students to help stitch the tapestry at her Portsmouth studio.

“She offered to bring the tapestry here,” Voccio said. “That way as many of them, as soon as possible, could learn about it and have the experience to participate in a project that's bigger than them, bigger than the school, bigger on a larger scale.”

In addition to the fashion students helping work on the tapestry, students from various history classes at the school also came by the take a look at the tapestry and learn about the events it depicts.

Katin, who said that volunteers are very much welcome to reach out and lend a hand as the tapestry returns to The Stitchery (you can reach her at thestitcheryri@gmail.com), added that the project has been a wonderful means to expose more people of all ages to the joys of embroidery and fabric arts.

“My passion is instilling the love of sewing in younger generations,” she said. “At The Stitchery, I work with kids as young as seven on sewing machines. I do mostly begin my work in after school classes with kids, teens, and adults even. The more we can spread the word to younger people, the better.”