"Embroidermation": Animation Created With Embroidery

Stop motion animation is such a notoriously time-consuming and demanding craft. Animator Nina Paley takes the art even further with what she calls “embroidermation.” The mind-boggling technique is exactly what it sounds like—animation made with embroidered images. 

Paley combines her efforts with fellow animator Theodore Gray. Each panel is embroidered by hand and then animated with a program created by Gray called Mathematica. Together, the pair makes amazingly intricate animated videos. First came the impressive music video for “Tharsis Sleeps" by Throne, which was created with 45 million stitches. 

This was followed by Chad Gadya, a short movie set to a traditional Passover folk song. Animation frames were stitched in groups of six in a circle on matzo covers. In total there were a whopping 516 frames on 86 matzo covers. The labor-intensive animation was created to be an intermission for Paley's larger movie, Seder-Masochism. 

A lot of computer manipulation went into the project, but Gray was careful to not let it hinder the beauty of the embroidery. On his blog, he reminds the reader that each frame is a photograph of a real object. He then goes into more detail about how the whole complicated process works. 

If you would like one of these matzo covers for yourself, they're all for sale. You can also see pictures of Paley at work on her blog.