Embarrassing Embroideries

This appalling piece of work looks like it was made by a drunk person, doesn't it? Note the wobbly lines, the unfinished rows, the uneven spacing, the stains, the pathetic attempt at drawn-thread work. I was not drunk when I made it, but I was twelve years old, and utterly indifferent to the womanly art of embroidery.

Needle arts class was the bane of my school years. My first teachers, an order of German nuns in Barcelona, attempted to teach me crochet when I was six. "Watch me, Eulalinchen" the kindly Schwester would say, leaning close, yarn and hook in hand. But I was too overwhelmed by the proximity of her black veil and her starched white wimple and her fingers twisting the yarn and thrusting the hook into undefined loops to master anything beyond the chain stitch.

In second grade, we were taught to knit. Once again the Schwester showed me how to stick the big needles (this time two of them!) into what looked to me like random spaces. At home, my mother did some supplementary tutoring and even made a row or two for me, but by the end of the school year all I had to show for my efforts was a blue "scarf," barely longer than it was wide, with an enormous gap in the middle.

Just before the start of the summer vacation, the nuns would invite the parents to the annual needlework show. Crocheted doilies and knitted scarves, and the sophisticated embroideries of the older girls were pinned in decorative patters to the classroom walls. I still remember walking into that room with my parents, not wanting to look up because I knew that my scarf with its hole was too disgraceful to be exhibited.

But then, "Look! There it is!" my mother exclaimed. My scarf was on  the wall, among the more accomplished efforts of my agile-fingered classmates. And, miracle of miracles, you could not see the hole! The clever Schwester had pinned all four corners of the scarf to the wall, and scrunched up the middle, where the hole was, with a bright red ribbon.

In Ecuador, where I attended a school run by nuns imported from Spain, there was even more emphasis on needlework. That is where, with sweat and tears and gritted teeth, I produced the sampler shown above. Fortunately my mother, who had spent years of her life embroidering linens and baby clothes and my head-to-toe First Communion veil, overcame her upbringing and her culture and did not give my poor performance with needle and thread any importance. She had greater heights in mind for me to scale.

Although my mother's casual attitude helped, needlework class was an endless trial. But all those years of struggle paid off when, at fourteen, I moved to Birmingham, Alabama, and entered a high school run by Benedictine nuns. As Americans, these nuns were more practical-minded than my previous teachers and, in Home Ec, instead of cutwork and crewel, we were taught to make a skirt.

After some trouble learning how to thread the sewing machine (I knew very little English and couldn't understand the instructions) I came into my glory when it was time to finish the seams and hem the bottom of the skirt, which we did by hand. Most of the girls had never held a needle or worn a thimble, whereas I had had years of experience. Catch stitch, slip stitch, even blanket stitch held no secrets from me. The Schwester in Barcelona, and the hermana in Quito would have been pleased to see Sister Dorothy hold up, for the class's admiration, the flawless hem of my blue wool skirt.

Much later, my attitude towards needle and thread changed. In the 70s I joined the rest of my generation and crocheted afghans and ponchos out of granny squares. I made dresses for myself and my daughters, and even embroidered a Jacobean bell pull to summon nonexistent servants. 

The brain is a thrifty organ, and nothing that life throws its way is ever lost. My early needlework traumas probably  improved my eye-hand coordination. But they also taught me patience, humility, and frustration tolerance--life skills that have proven far more useful than the ability to produce flawless satin stitches or French knots.

(In this video, Renate Hiller makes an eloquent case for the teaching of handwork to children, and for the benefits that it offers to people of all ages.)

Needle And Thread

Spent some time with  needle and thread this morning, repairing my spouse's pants.  But first I had to blow the dust off the tray that holds my sewing supplies.

It's rainy and gloomy today, what my mother used to call "a day for mending socks."  A day for staying indoors, sitting by a window, working at some undemanding yet productive, soothing task.  I can still see her, darning egg in hand, bent over an old sock while our Andalusian maid regaled us with stories of Holy Week in Malaga as she folded the laundry.

While struggling to thread my needle I thought of the two pairs of socks I had thrown away in as many weeks.  Each pair had one hole in one sock, but they were different colors, so I couldn't combine the remaining good socks into a pair.  I remember thinking, "I should mend this hole," and then quickly, "Life's too short to be mending socks."   Before I could change my mind I dropped them in the trash, and now they're on their way to a landfill, along with 85% of clothing purchased in the U.S. on any given year.

I've been feeling some clothes guilt lately, having bought two dresses in the same month as the Bangladesh factory disaster.  But one of those dresses came from Gudrun Sjoden, a Swedish designer who, on her website, advises us to wear our old clothes with pride and to wash them only when they are in fact dirty.  Otherwise, she counsels, we should just air them out and spot clean them.  Needless to say, her clothes are manufactured in observance of fair-trade and ecological standards.  When you buy one of her outfits you feel that you're actually contributing to the well-being of Mother Earth.

Nevertheless, I know that the kindest thing I can do for Mother Earth is to keep wearing the clothes that are presently in my closet over and over and over, until I die.  If I stop washing them so often and begin to mend them, I can probably even pass them on to my descendants.  This is how it was for most of human history, after all, with textiles being saved and reconstructed to fit the next generation.

If current apocalyptic scenarios come true, those days may come around again.  Good-bye then to clothes as entertainment, as expressions of a spring day's mood, as symbols of momentary enthusiasms.   Hello to clothes as mere weather protection.

But maybe there will be some good times in exchange.  European lyric poetry began with the chansons de toile, the songs that women sang while sitting at their weaving a thousand years ago.  Maybe when the economy collapses for good and the climate changes beyond recognition, on rainy days women will again sit together by a window, mending socks, telling stories, making up songs.

The Womanly Art Of Hemming

I just finished shortening, and hemming, seven dresses and two skirts.  Some of these items I'd been wearing for years, while others were recent acquisitions from the fabled church rummage sale in a nearby village.  They all were way too long for me--clearly meant for giantesses--with the hems hovering in the vicinity of my ankles.

The cutting and sewing brought back memories of the elaborate hemming rituals of my childhood, conducted by my mother with the assistance of one of her sisters or the maid.  In those days, the women of my family left serious dressmaking to professional seamstresses, limiting their own participation in the process to choosing the fabric and the pattern, and critiquing the result.  But they all mended assiduously:  they darned socks with the aid of a wooden egg;  they turned my father's shirt collars when they got frayed;  and when sheets started showing wear in the center, they cut them down the middle and sewed the edges together.  And, because I was a growing child, they were forever letting out my seams and letting down my hems.

Letting down a hem involved my putting on the garment in question--the old hem having been previously ripped out and the fabric ironed flat--and standing in the middle of the room while my mother or her assistant orbited around me on her knees with a mouthful of pins, muttering "Stand up straight!  Turn to the right--no, this way.  Not that far.  Go back!  Stand still for a minute, child."

When the hemmer determined that all the points in the circumference of the skirt were equidistant from the floor, she removed the dress and dismissed me.  She then carefully turned under the raw edge of the hem and basted it in place.  She removed the pins.  She threaded a fine needle with thread the exact shade of the dress and, without using a knot to anchor the thread (knots are sloppy!), started sewing the hem, making sure to pick up just a single thread on the right side of the fabric with each stitch.  We owned a treadle sewing machine, but nobody would have dreamed of using that coarse instrument to make a hem.  Just as the Parisian haute couture workshops do to this day, hems at our house were always made by hand.

When the hem was finished, she snipped off the thread with scissors (never with the teeth, because doing that would wear grooves in the enamel) and ironed the finished product by placing a wet cloth between the dress and the iron.  This gave off a toasty smell as delicious as the smell of fresh croissants.  She pulled the dress off the ironing board, placed it on a hanger, and stored it in my armoire (there was not a single closet in our Art Nouveau apartment).

That was long ago and far away.  In the following decades, life and the course of history changed radically, to say the least.  Here is how I--who learned to hem in that apartment in Barcelona, with the balcony doors open to the sun and the sound of streetcars clanging by--hemmed my seven dresses and two skirts.

First, having no assistants, I put on each garment, stood in front of the mirror, and stuck a single pin in the approximate region where I thought the edge of the skirt should be.  Then I set up the ironing board and got out a ruler.  I measured the distance between the old edge and the proposed edge all around the skirt, sticking pins where the ruler more or less indicated.  With a sharp pair of scissors I then cut the fabric from pin to pin, doing my best to keep a straight line.

I removed the pins, folded the raw edge over about a quarter of an inch, and set the fold with a hot iron.  Then I folded the edge again, and ironed that, thus avoiding all that boring basting.  I threaded my sewing machine with a thread the approximate shade of the garment (it's a 45 minute drive from my house to a store that sells any shade of thread other than black or white), and sewed the hem with--and my aunts would be  dismayed to know this--a straight stitch. 

I realize that all the points on the circumference of those hems I just finished are not equidistant from the ground.  And you can definitely see the stitching on the right side of the fabric, in an imperfectly matched thread shade at that.  But I'm content that the job is done and I won't have to go around looking like an elderly child playing dress-up anymore.

Domesticities

I went out to consult with Our Forester this morning. He and his son are turning the woods behind our backyard into a sort of "park"--you know, like you see in those BBC specials about the Great Houses of England. They are clearing out the skinny trees and the undergrowth so that the big trees can grow even bigger and we can walk unimpeded by thorn bushes and honeysuckle. As the big trees grow, their canopy will shade the ground and keep down the undergrowth, and voila--we will have our English park.

The wind was blowing so hard while the Forester and I talked that when I got back in the house I was chilled to the bone. Even though it was morning, I lit a fire in the stove. But that meant that I had to stay in the living room, to tend the fire and, well, to enjoy it. I'm still enough of a flatlander that I think of fire in aesthetic rather than utilitarian terms.

"I know," I thought, "I'll do some mending." There was a pair of my husband's pants that needed re-hemming. Perfect! I could sit by the fire in the a.m. and do something useful as well. I brought my sewing things into the living room got to work.

Sewing--such a peaceful activity. Kind of like carving stone in its slowness. Sitting by the fire, hemming my husband's pants, I felt connected to Victorian women in their stuffy rooms, medieval women in their chilly towers. Heck, I felt connected to my mother in the 1950s, who used to like to darn socks on rainy days.

Unfortunately, I always like the idea of sewing better than the act. I get tense and impatient, and make bigger and bigger stitches. This time, to make sure I stayed on-task, I put on Handel's "Messiah." My musician father would have called this philistine multi-tasking, an act of lese-majeste, an insult to Handel and all musicians. I decided to ignore his voice as it lives in my mind, and get on with things.

It was wonderful. I was especially taken with the aria "Man of Sorrows," sung by a contralto. "He was des-pi-sed," it goes, "re-jec-ted. A man of sorrows, and rejected by men..." Who, especially what artist, hasn't felt that way? When the rejection letters come, it helps to know that others, including the Son of God, have experienced it before.

The pant cuffs were finished before the oratorio. I went into the kitchen and made a gallon and a half of mint and green tea. We keep this in the fridge and drink it cold or hot for a week. I filled a large tea ball with green tea. I filled a square of muslin with a mixture of mint, apple mint, orange mint and melissa, tied it up, and put that and the tea ball in a 1 1/2 gallon glass jug. In the summer, I set this out on the stoop and let the sun do its magic. Today, I had to heat the water and let the whole thing steep a while. I was glad to be using some of my dried mints--I have 18 jars of various kinds, and before I know it, the real, fresh mint will be sprouting up in the corner between the house and the garage. I also felt good because mint tea is good for you.

Now my husband, as I sit by the fire writing this, is sweetening the tea. That is his job. He pours in just the right amount of honey, deals with the stickiness, makes sure the honey dilutes evenly. Funny how, as a couple, we have specialized. I make the tea, he sweetens it. I cook dinner, he washes dishes. He drives the car, I do the talking. I teach the girls how to write, he teaches them how to drive...it's been going on for over forty years, this division of labor. It's efficient in many ways, but often I think, what would either one of us do on our own?

The "Messiah" is over now. England is told that God will smite its enemies "like a potter's vessel"; the King is reassured. The fire is still going and, outside, Our Forester is wrapping up for the day. It is still light. I don't want to write another "spring is coming" post, but I am human, and above all, I am an animal. So I can't help it: spring is coming, and I'm glad.

The Cape

My soon-to-be-five years old grandson , Remy, is a chivalrous little guy, but when you're trying to save the world from evil, it helps if you have the right outfit. His mother told me that the other day he came downstairs with a sheet of newspaper wrapped around his shoulders, fastened at the neck with a taped-on penny. So I've decided to make him a cape for his birthday.

The cape is long and wide, made of black felt with a blood-red lining. It has a raised collar, a fancy gold clasp, and, I hope, the right sweep and swish. It is not a magician's cape, or a Dracula cape. It is an all-purpose cape, for saving princesses or fighting trolls or doing card tricks.

It's difficult to find a gift for a child—or anybody--these days. The avalanche of cheaply available goods that swept over America after World War II has made it impossible for adults as well as children to truly hanker for things. Of course some people hanker for helicopters, McMansions, and yachts. But I'm talking about ordinary stuff, like sweaters, or dolls, or toy cars. The ordinary house today is bursting at the seams with these, leaving little room for wishing and dreaming.

Wanting to please, but hating to add to the clutter, we as grandparents have faced this dilemma every birthday and Christmas since Remy's older sister Violette was born six years ago. The solution we have arrived at is to offer hand-made gifts whenever possible. (It's not clutter if it's hand-made.) Out of Ed's workshop have come a gorgeous pull-cart full of blocks, an art-supplies box and, most recently, a toy chest made in collaboration with the recipients. I've produced a clay statuette of a princess, a be-jewelled, heart-shaped pendant with Ed's picture on one side and mine on the other, a dress for Violette, and now this cape.

The last time I sewed anything, my daughters were toddlers. Now I'm trying to recapture long-lost skills—how to read a pattern, how to line a collar.

Today, having cut the cape and the satin lining and the collar and the interfacing, I put on a Schubert CD and started sewing. It was chamber music at first, and as I pinned and basted I thought about my father, and how chamber music had been his love. I listened to a Schubert piano trio and it sounded not exactly familiar, but absolutely right. I must have heard him practice the violin part. I must have been taken to the performance. I wish I could talk to him about this music. I would like to think that he's listening too, as I sit here making a cape for his great-grandson.

A great-grandson, in a family of girls. What a surprise he was, when we met him at the Maternite in Paris, not only male, but blond and blue-eyed. Where, we wondered, had this little Visigoth come from? I took care of him for several days when he was six months old, and it struck me how uncannily like my husband he was—calm and amiable, interested in his meals, but happy to keep busy putting stuff together and taking it apart.

That resemblance, physical but especially psychological, has continued to amuse and amaze us. How did Ed's influence skip over our two girls only to emerge full-blown a generation later?

I trimmed seams and listened to Schubert and thought of my long-dead father, of my little grandson. No obvious resemblance there. Before fusing the interfacing to the collar I switched from chamber music to Schubert's “Travels In Winter,” sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. We will be traveling in winter down to Philadelphia, to celebrate a birthday. Poor Schubert, dead at 37, left no descendants other than his music.

But oh, “Travels In Winter,” with D F-D! Fie on those fashionable tenors. Give me a baritone like Dietrich of the three names. I turn the cape collar and iron it flat as he pours out his manly sorrows: “mein Herz, mein Herz!” He truly is my favorite singer...him and Elvis. I never asked my father what he thought of Elvis. I wish I had.

And now the cape is almost finished. Tomorrow I will attach the collar, and sew on the gold(ish) clasp. The day after we will travel in winter to Philadelphia and deliver it to Remy. When he takes it out of the box, it will be impregnated with hours of thought, reflections, memories. Sewed into it will be the music of Schubert, the voice of Dietrich, the memory of his great-grandfather, and my own desire to make him a real gift, something he can wrap himself in, and be anything he wants to be.