Embroidery
...and the brain bureaucrat.
I love doing embroidery… LOVE it. Mostly for the actual feel of the thread passing through the fabric. If you’ve ever passed a silky embroidery thread through fabric you may know what I’m talking about. There’s a small ‘pop’ as the eye of the needle, carrying the thread penetrates the weave of the fabric, and then there is the minuscule amount of friction that comes from silky thread passing through that tiny hole. You can hear it too - it doesn’t sound smooth, but it feels smooth. And then there is the fact that you have to be gentle during the ultimate part of pulling the thread through, so that your stitch doesn’t pull on the fabric…so that it stays flat, and your stitch looks beautiful. And finally, the fact that it involves ZERO thinking.
Embroidery is, from this point of view, very much like ironing, or sweeping, or weeding. Pure, unadulterated mindlessness.
But we must all push ourselves outside of mindlessness sometimes. I have wanted for a while to design and make my own embroidery, but knew I’d never do it without peer pressure (Peer pressure is VERY useful….I have peer pressure to thank for most of the stuff I’ve EVER completed in my life). So I signed up to do an online course with The Fabled Thread, where loads of us have been coaxed through a process of creating a design, making it work for an embroidery, and finally stitching it up over the last ten weeks.
It’s been brilliant, and very, very confronting.
Instead of just taking someone else’s pattern and nestling into the joy of copying it, I had to face a blank sheet of paper, come up with a design and refine it. Despite the fact that Eppie has broken this process down into small chunks, which in themselves are simple and fun, I found them quite agonising at times (even with colour, subject and time constraints), because I’m just not a natural creator.
A natural creator is thrilled with a blank sheet of paper. This person is utterly un-attached to the outcome of any marks they make on said paper. And crucially, this person is unjudgemental about their own work. Seriously…these people make marks, enjoy doing so, and then make more marks and all they feel is happy and curious. That’s it. Completely unperturbed. Bloody hell. Look at this guy with his green top and his pigtails and his necklace:
I think you can probably practice this and master it…stands to reason; if you never practice generating original ideas then that part of your brain won’t grow, will it.
As you can see, I did finish!… but only because I adore the stitching part, and because I have practiced, as a mother being ‘good enough’. I thought a lot yesterday about the point at which this pathological aversion to looking bad (even to myself…particularly to myself) is masking sheer laziness. I don’t know the answer!
I’ve been leading an embroidery class for Timegivers (excellent charity connecting schoolchildren to charities by facilitating volunteering - do get involved if you have an hour or so in your schedule that you could spare). We were making lavender bags for the local care home. All the children began with gusto, but not all of them finished like that. Once they started on their own design, a couple of them became beset by what I can only describe as a nasty little bureaucrat in their brain, telling them they were somehow doing it wrong, or it didn’t look good, or it wasn’t like they wanted it to be. These two were desperate for any excuse not to finish. In the end they were coaxed to the finish line only by the idea that they were making these things for someone else who would treasure them. The bureaucrat gets in early doesn’t it…they were both girls btw - the little boys just enjoyed themselves and were thrilled with their work.
Enough. Back to following sublime instructions!
Are you someone who loves to invent things from scratch, or do you, like me love just the making part? Or are you excellent at both?
x Laetitia
Love this.....My mother was brought up in a convent in Belgium. Apart from God and Jesus, embroidery appeared to be a key part of life. She took it up again after a 30 year gap and began embroidering almost anything she could get her hands on, mainly her grandkid's shoe bags. I'll never forget the look on my daughter's teacher's face when she arrived with her gym shoes in a red cloth bag with the most extraordinary bird of paradise exquisitely stitched onto it. It looked like something out of the Vatican.....
Oh yes! My current creative outlet is fair isle knitting ! It’s become a bit of an obsession - in particular creating and knitting my own fairisle hot water bottle covers in proper wool for proper 100% rubber bottles. Oh the pleasure; the warmth, the smell, the texture, the homeliness. Pure pure comfort in a rather worrisome world