For me, sewing is an intimate act. To sew, you must become familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of your hands, eyes, and patience.
Sewing feels less an activity and more like a person I have known for so long they have become family. In my fiction classes, we discussed how the setting can be a character, how The Haunting of Hill House (the book, not the Netflix series!) the house was not necessarily a person, but certainly a character. By this, I mean that sewing is not a friend, but a friendly feeling, inviting even when I feel lonely or frustrated.
I started sewing when I was five, and I decided to make a skirt out of paper and yarn. I hole-punched the sides so I could use the yarn to fasten it together. In the subsequent years, I learned to sew with a needle and thread from my grandmother, classes in school, and Youtube videos. However, I don’t make anything particularly interesting. Sometimes I make pillows, and I once made an apron from a sage and gold fabric that was completely impractical for everyday use but beautiful to hook over my vanity mirror. Mainly, I hand sew small coin purses. I almost always give them away, and I see them scattered everywhere: one friend used it for makeup and another for Dungeons and Dragons’ dice. What is the point of making them, though?
I don’t have a better answer than I just like to. I like making my seams smaller and smaller until they disappear even when you stretch the fabric. I recently started embroidery, and I think this hobby links up a little better to me because it is so repetitive. Noticing and embracing this shift was a quiet act of self-love. It is easy to go by in life doing things we like okay simply because we always have or because they fill time. By making a small shift in something I do regularly, I enhanced my appreciation for it. This small action turned my attention fully to my practice and helped me begin to examine what part sewing has played in my life.
Coming Back to Myself
In many folktales, textiles are metaphors for the body and life itself. In “Deep-Seated Associations: Textile Threads in Language, Myths, Fairy Tales, and Novels,” by Beverly Gorden, she analyzes how rhetoric like “entwined” and the description of DNA as “strands” has linked sewing and weaving with our primal selves. Binding is a word that can just as easily describe sewing as it can a relationship. These primal associations have made sewing an extension of the self and a metaphor for mental processes. Penelope in The Odyssey used thread and weaving to stop time while she waited for her husband. She used crafting to hold fear and suitors away and was not necessarily happy or unhappy. When I sew, time is both too fast and slow at the same time. I have lost hours creating a pillow, only to feel as though I am “waking up” for dinner. On the other hand, when I haven’t sewed in a while, getting back to sewing makes the first hour difficult and sometimes excruciating, with each moment neatly cataloged in my mind. Even though sewing is an activity outside of myself, it forces me to look inside.
In the moments of frustration with sewing, I know that I am battling not with the needle and thread so much as with my perfectionism. Since I started sewing when I was five, it feels like something I should know how to do, and facing that I have to begin again makes me feel childish and resentful. In this case, the problem is also the solution; the only way to make up for lack of practice is practice. And while I do it, I become both conscious and preoccupied, which is the only way I can be fully present. I’ve noticed for me, and why I have never given up sewing, only hibernated from it occasionally, is that it makes being alone enjoyable. Sewing relieves the typical anxieties of being alone because I am doing something and because I feel productive even though I am not creating anything that I even plan to use. This productivity allows me to feel cocooned.
I also notice when I don’t sew, it is because I am not interested in being alone with myself in this way. I am afraid of my own frustration and my own perfectionism. I don’t want to casually explore my thoughts without emotionally intense indie-pop songs that articulate my feelings or dramatic shows that fill a void.
You Like What You Like
Brené Brown, Ph.D. L.M.S.W. a psychologist who studies vulnerability and the author of The Gifts of Imperfection, concludes that being a confidant requires us to be:
“deeply rooted, able to bend, and most of all, we need someone who embraces us for our strengths and struggles. We need to honor our struggle by sharing it with someone who has earned the right to hear it.” In reading this, I thought deeply about what it meant to do this for myself. What version of myself can take in the difficult things in my life with an openness and lack of dismissal? In what ways can I act with love towards myself?
Parts of my story, like everyone’s, contain pain. My father was violent throughout my childhood. People in the town I grew up in would describe him as “a storm cloud.” The supervisor at a food pantry I worked at in my teens met my father once and said, “he loves you a lot, but I’m a little afraid of him.” Afterward, he tried to laugh, but it sounded so false that he immediately stopped and looked at his phone instead. My father was violent and when he wasn’t abusive to my family and his coworkers, he used his size or his voice to threaten it. However, when I look back, some of the things that sting the most are when he made fun of things I liked (such as my irrationally intense devotion to Selena Gomez) or my sexuality. I’m not saying this is true for everyone who has survived abuse. I would absolutely never claim that, but it’s true for me. When he was violent, some part of me always knew it was about him. When he made fun of the things I liked, it felt very much about me.
After I push through my initial frustration in sewing, I feel a strange moment of guilt for liking sewing. Did I have to do something to earn this feeling of contentment? Am I allowed? As I fall deeper into the meditative state, I feel good in a wholesome and sexless kind of way. And the more I do it, the less I think about why I am doing it. There is such a deep feeling of satiation in the motion. This is a strange kind of unconditional love I can give myself. In these moments, I no longer intellectualize why I deserve things but simply embrace them.
Meditation and Love
Jim Denevan is an artist that creates sculptures in sand, ice, and earth with three-pronged tools and rakes. The geometric shapes he creates eventually wash away with the tide or are eroded by the weather. At first, this seems irrational and even useless, with no clear purpose. In an article “The Artist Who's Happy With All His Work Being Washed Away” in The Guardian by Gabrielle Canon, Denevan replies to this argument by saying:
“People have a hard time with this feeling of impermanence, of doing something that seems like it has no real purpose – which really is all art on some level. But I fully bought into the idea that there’s a much bigger thing occurring and the art plays a much bigger role than humanity, or at least our society, gives it credit for.”
In my desire to create, I both yearn to affect someone and also to manifest something. When I write, it is easier to describe what I want to manifest. I want to be intimate with my audience, I want to read my name under my publication, I want to get as close to the truth as I can manage, and I want to make money. Sewing, however, especially when it is simply coin purses that I give away, has no clear use. When the coin purse is done, I give it away and forget about the pleasure the making gave me. The nights I spent are forgotten just as quickly, too, especially in the periods of time when I am not sewing, and doing other things instead. Again, I wonder what is the point of sewing for me? And again, I am forced to conclude simply, because I like it.