I have been embroidering a lot over these past wretched days weeks. I expect to be doing a lot more of it as we watch Democracy circle the drain.
That fiber is one of my favored materials is not new, but I’m not sure I’ve shared publicly how much this particular practice calms me, or how I learned about it. So here it is.
About a decade ago, I was trying to find the ground after the sudden end of my first marriage. I was ok in many ways, but I would periodically find myself in a state of panic, eventually familiar enough that I gave it a named. (“The Abyss.”)
After all, I’d profoundly misjudged the person around which I’d built two whole decades of my life. How could I trust my judgement or perceptions of anything after that? Everything and everyone was utterly unpredictable, the universe was disordered, chaotic and dangerous.*
The Abyss would find me on nights where I hadn’t made any plans — something I therefore avoided but obviously it happened — and then I would white knuckle my way through it, mostly trying to not reach out to ill-advised suitors as a coping mechanism. (The Abyss could not survive in the presence of others.) Until eventually the world would shift back into some kind of trusted solidity and I would carry on.
At this time I was taking a lot of art classes, especially at the Center for Book Arts, and enrolled in a class about using embroidery in books, taught by the entirely brilliant Ivivia Olenick.
It had been many years since I’d held a needle. I’d had at least one cross stitch kit as a kid, and after college had a phase where I got into the kits again. But at that pre-internet time, the kits that were available to me were from big box craft stores, and they were cloying. Kittens, flowers, childish motifs, none of it in a good way. I liked doing them, but I didn’t want to display them, or even look at them again once I was done. So it quickly lost its appeal.
It never occurred to me that I could embroider without a kit, without a pattern. That I could find fabric and thread I liked, learn about different stitches and just make something, just as I would on paper with traditional art supplies.
As I sat in the class at the CBA, that lightbulb went on. The teacher showed us examples of her work, including lots of embroidered text. I had text! As I writer I’ve always had plenty of words. And I could draw, and I could do all of that in thread. It was thrilling. It was like falling in love.
The class let out into a summer Saturday evening and I raced to The City Quilter (RIP) to buy supplies.
My plans for that night fell through, and I felt the Abyss starting to hover. Instead of picking up my phone, I picked up my fabric and decided to figure out how to do a stitch called French knot. It had given me trouble in class — it’s often a difficult one for new embroiderers because it’s such a different maneuver. **
A couple of hours later, I had figured it out.
And more important: I realized that the Abyss had never come. For the first time, I didn’t have to white knuckle my way through it. And I didn’t need anyone else to make it go away. I had found a way to calm myself.
The next time it worked the same way. And ever since it has proven reliable as a way to regulate myself, through small bumps and deep ditches.
In the years since I’m fairly sure I’ve tried all the major fiber art forms and some of the minor ones as well. I’d consider myself at an equally advanced level with crochet***, so that’s something I also do quite a bit, and it is also soothing.
I would say, though, that for me it requires a different head space than embroidery, because by its nature it is less spontaneous and improvisational. I do design my own patterns, but even when I’m inventing on the fly, there is counting and strategizing in a way that is unnecessary with free form embroidery.****
There’s a difference between creating a form out of fiber and embellishing a surface. I need some degree of concentration to crochet, but I can come to embroidery in almost any state.
For me, the form that seems to most nearly approach embroidery in terms of improvisational possibilities is weaving on a frame loom. After the loom is properly warped and you have a foundation, you can pretty much do as you like. I did this a lot during the pandemic. It’s less wieldy than embroidery so it is not something I turn to as often.
With all that said, I don’t mean to imply a hierarchy. Some mental states are helped by concentration and counting. There’s a reason why people tell you to count back from 100 when you can’t sleep.
And let me be clear: I’m not saying that embroidery solved all my problems. Medication — which I finally realized I also needed— was equally as important.
But embroidery has been a good and reliable tool for me to have in my mental health and creative kit and if you haven’t tried it, maybe it could be for you as well. And Lord knows we’re all going to need something to get through the horrors that await us, if it is indeed possible to get through it at all.
Also: I liked the super macro shots of embroidery which best approximate how it seems to me. I took them from the piece on the right, below. It’s the second I completed in November, both on vintage hankies. In case you’re curious, here they are, along with hastily photographed “before” pictures of what the material looked like before I got stabby. (The photo of the second embroidery is literally just finished, so it’s not pressed and not stretched as the first one is.)
Side notes:
*I do believe that this is fundamentally true, by the way. But that only the most enlightened people can be continually aware of that and be able to function. It’s like how we all know that everyone we love is mortal, and yet we can’t dwell on that every minute of every day — no one would ever do their laundry.
**If you are similarly confounded by French knots, the issue for me was that I was putting the needle back in the exact same hole and the knot would just fall through. The trick is to go back in just slightly over from where you come out.
*** I only taught myself how to knit last year but I’m pretty sure it’s similar.
*****There is a form of improv crochet tragically called “scumbling” which doesn’t require quite as much, but you’re still increasing and reducing and I don’t love the look of it.
