**4. Forms of life threaded through levels of meaning and scales**

Forms of life are languages ([2], pp. 26). They are made up of elements of significance that deliver meaning to the world we inhabit both individually and collectively. These elements integrate and correlate among different levels and scales.

It is in these practices that elements interact with time and space. Practical scenes require subjects and a material context, whether social or symbolic, to operate their reality and to be able to transform it. The places of practice become enriched with the presence or absence of other participants, their tools and other objects that configure that space. Each one of them – in their structure, shape and use – bears significant elements that engage in dialog within a particular language system. The semiotics of practice, like theory and methodology, identifies fields of expression at different levels: "a practice integrates signs and texts, and even an isolated sign" ([9], pp. 18). The level of immanence of these practices allows us to move at generative scales of expression according to the relevance of that movement in its analysis. Thus, it has the same capacity for signification; in this case, they are the patio, the means of work of the embroiderers and even the designs embroidered on a fabric.

The practical scene and the articulated strategies adjust to the act and then are resignified. In other words, for example, the practice changes if one sews in the patio, or during the night inside a room, or while walking. In addition, other practices that are coupled with embroidering, like sewing garments or its commercialization. When a practical scene is adjusted, it also moves all the levels that constitute it.

If we think about the space of this system, we can consider that the scenes of practices can be created from scaled spaces such as rooms, houses or neighborhoods, and also from the personal, familial or communal interactions at a local level on a spatial scale. We can speak about regional, national or global scales, insofar as there is a tendency to generalize and typify forms of life. The distinction of practices in this proportion is blurred. Just as in the scaled system of meaning, in terms of space, "what happens at one scale cannot be understood outside of the nested relationships that exist across a hierarchy of scales" ([10], pp. 95).

Thus, a practice cannot be understood as exempt from other practices, nor as a form of life independent from other forms of life. Fontanille points out that "a form of life exists…in the confrontation and comparison with others" ([2], pp. 71). This is the result of the conflict generated by being and acting upon a world of counterpoints with other existences and performances that adjust their forms to different extents. It has, at the level of practice, the transforming potential of its form to change, profoundly, the course of its life [2].

*A Hundred Stitches Make a Canvas: How the Practice of Embroidery Relates to Forms of Life… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.105162*
