For better or worse, Twitter is the home to a lot of harebrained ideas. One great example of that is the @TweetXstitch account, which creates framed representations of some of the dumbest, funniest and most memorable moments at Twitter, taking ephemeral tweets and immortalizing them through the medium of needle and thread.
The account started, as so many other silly things, with Kanye West. The hip hop artist had the world in stitches with his oh-so-very-pointed “butt stuff” tweet storm at the beginning of the year. What started as a one-off joke by twin sisters Kathryn Rodger and Charlotte Braddick turned into an ongoing campaign to find sharp tweets worth remembering and turning them into cross-stitches.
There is a thread running through the immortalized tweets; they are mostly nuggets of throw-away wisdom that would normally be forgotten rather than sown into the fabric of our collective minds.
Classics include this bit of nutritional advice from rapper T-Pain:
Night of heavy drinking? Eat a slice of cheese after every drink. The constipation will prevent the beer shits in the morning. Youre welcome
— T-Pain (@TPAIN) February 18, 2016
One particularly insightful interpretation of the messages from the gods from “party king” Andrew WK:
PARTY TIP: A hangover is just the Party God’s way of telling you how awesome you were last night.
— ANDREW W.K. (@AndrewWK) February 26, 2013
Where the account goes from the “haha funny” to the downright hilarious, however, is when the people who’ve been cross-stitched insert themselves into the loop with retweets or replies.
Some of you may remember, for example, when the English MP Ed Balls joined Twitter, he did so with great aplomb, tweeting only his own name. The clumsy move was first met with derision and jokes, but ultimately, it weaseled its way into the hearts of the population. The tweet became an epic meme, with national newspapers in the U.K. calling it “Ed Balls day” — even celebrating its third and fourth anniversaries with news stories.
Ed Balls
— Ed Balls (@edballs) April 28, 2011
The London and Cardiff-based team behind TweetXstitch made a cross-stitch of the famous tweet.
Which, in turn, was picked up by the Member of Parliament, who shared it with his followers.
Got to say @tweetXstitch… this is one of the more surreal ‘anniversary’ tweets of ‘that tweet’ I’ve seen.. https://t.co/O4gmMrDDsU
— Ed Balls (@edballs) April 3, 2016
Absolutely brilliant, and well worth giving the account a follow to keep abreast of their antics.
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So, why am I so excited about a couple of ladies cross-stitching tweets? I’m not. Not about the cross-stitching itself — but as a passionate user of the Twitter platform, I can’t but help that Twitter, as a company, is getting an unfairly hard ride at the moment. The numbers of the Twitter platform, or the deeply dysfunctional relationship the company has with Wall Street, are undoubtedly reasons to worry about the long-term success of the platform. But to look at stories like this one can conclude that its demise is nigh seems equally inaccurate.
Accounts like TweetXstitch areareminderoftheweirdandwonderfulthingsthatarehappeningonTwitter, everyday; itkeepsthesocialnetworkfreshandinteresting. Longmaytheircreativitycontinue.