A certain calm descends when I am making something. Or making four somethings. Namely, three dresses and a knit shirt.
While brainstorming countless others.
Without deadline, and with no recipient in mind but myself.
In a strange way, it can be a bit disquieting to feel such a calm. In our fast-paced culture, it’s so easy to feel wrong, mistaken–like I’m missing out on something–when I stand at my cutting table to alter a pattern. Sometimes I treat it like an experiment: I’ll spend the next hour sewing. If the world doesn’t crumble around my ears because I wasn’t doing xyz instead, then maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all. I do the same thing with writing. When I put off laundry, sweeping, dishes to sit at the desk and write or revise, a million other things to do pop into my head. But again, I experiment: If I put off checking the mail and filing bank statements until I’ve finished this scene–and the world is still here when I lift my head again–then maybe I’m onto something.
Of course, I live with no small amount of dust hiding under my furniture. Because the truth is this: the sewing, the writing? They make me happier. I keep doing them. The world is always still here. And I, a cheerier citizen in it.
I wrote a 10-page paper once about schoolgirl samplers.* That is, the textiles that girls in the 18th and 19th centuries embroidered with alphabets, quotations, names, and pictorial motifs from nature. Ever seen a Whitman’s Sampler for sale at the drug store? Yeah, embroidery samplers look a bit like the Whitman’s box. And the basic concept is the same. Whereas a Whitman’s Sampler is a sampling of chocolates, an embroidery sampler is a sampling of stitches. In their early stages, samplers were a way to keep track of how to form different letters and images, so that girls could mark linens and other items with the family initials when they ran their own households.
A far cry from my sewing for pleasure. Never mind that the dresses I’m making fall above the knee–a fact that would have caused scandal in the 1800s. It’s the very act of choice involved here. When I embroidered the bag above that my mother made for my grandmother’s 80th birthday, it was pure fun. It was my first, and so far only, cross-stitch project–just for the heck of it. Sure, I wanted to please my grandmother with well-made stitches, but there was no sense of proving myself with it.
Over time, as sampler-making evolved, they came to represent much more than marking bed linens so they wouldn’t get lost in the town wash. Samplers became required curriculum in a number of schools. They showed a girl’s ability to follow directions, to sit quietly, to form letters (even if taught reading, girls weren’t necessarily given the chance to practice writing at the same time). Some were framed as works of art, some were given as gifts. But above all, a well-made sampler was not just a representation of a girl’s skill with a needle and thread; it was proof that she possessed those qualities most valued (and expected) in a female.
I could go on about the subject for–well, at least 10 pages. My paper examined samplers as a way to gain insight into what girls were learning at the time, since records of curricula for girls are much more sparse than such records for boys. But the relevant thing to say here is this: were this the 1800s, I may not be battling quite the same anxieties. Sewing, instead of an indulgence, would be a chore. Maybe an enjoyable chore for someone like me, but a chore nonetheless. And that cross-stitch bag up there wouldn’t simply be something I chose to make in my free time; it would be proof of how I fit into the ideals of my time.
Today, it’s a world where artists make cereal samplers as statements about what we’ve gained and lost with the mechanization of our culture. A world where I can download patterns off the internet, if I so choose, and where people are often surprised if I share that the corduroys I’m wearing are ones I made myself.
I don’t know why sewing completes me in quite the way that it does. All I know is that it’s a minor miracle, what cutting out some floral fabric for a new princess-seam dress can do for my spirits. Clothes aren’t just clothes, I know that. They’re our social skin. A chance to declare ourselves and our values. To accept and fit our real bodies, rather than aspire to a manufactured ideal.
Not even half of my wardrobe is sewn by me. I don’t often have much time to take down fabric off my shelves and decide what I want my next blouse to look like. Until last week, I went months with the same green, fine-wale corduroy cut out for a Simplicity jumper, just sitting there on my table. But then, other times, the urge to sew takes over. I steal moments to stitch one more seam–then to press it–then, oh what the heck, to trace the pattern for the facing I forgot to cut out. But the next time I start to feel guilty about such moments, I may do well to remember what my samplers research taught me: there is a rich history to making something by hand. It’s not so radical at all to spend a quiet moment with some fabric and thread. What’s radical is that I get to choose to do it.
I am very lucky to have a hobby that brings such calm into my life. And then to take the time to write about it.
* Though I reference many facts here from memory, I don’t have at hand the various sources for each. Here are a few that I remember off the top of my head, though:
– Quaker School Girl Samplers from Ackworth by Carol Humphrey
– Samplers & Samplermakers by Mary Jaene Edmonds
– Girlhood Embroidery: American Samplers and Pictorial Needlework (Vols. I and II) by Betty Ring
– Westtown School Sampler Collection
Tags: Amy Butler, girlhood, patterns, samplers, Sewing, Simplicity
Filed under: Stitchery
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