Taking Your Time is the Point
And it turns out, so are other people.
“The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satidfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine and oil,
Hopi vases held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries out for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.”
from To be of use, by Marge Piercy
The best way to teach people sewing is to coach them through finishing a seam. Students thread the machine themselves first, struggling through the so-called boring parts — winding the bobbin, adjusting the tension, getting a feel for the chewing of the feed dogs and the measured edge marking until they can sew a straight, even line. We start with a French seam, just a few inches long, just a quarter inch wide. The effect of the effort is typically amazement—even if you do it badly, it looks and feels professional.
When I taught my first sewing class, most of the contents of my sewing room were strewn around the room and we used very little of it. Two people showed up. The second time, two different people showed up. I wasn’t sure if it was even worth it. It wasn’t how I envisioned it. Sometimes, you show up, so ready, and no one is there to meet you. Sometimes, as much as you want to, you don’t show up at all. You hold that shame or don’t. Sometimes you get lucky and everyone shows up. It shapes your sense of the possible.
Stitched together a life not mediated by my various machines has been a learning process; my schedule has become a motley assortment of clubs, a writing group, an audited college class. I joined a yoga studio, started walking the neighbor’s dog, volunteered as a mender at a clothing swap. I felt all the while painfully conspicuous. I had spent the past ten odd years writing from a dark room inside my house. I finally asked for help from my writing group, admitting things were going very badly. My beautiful friends said, go outside and talk to other people. Be brave. Forget drafts, and live in the world.
There are some things you cannot tell yourself successfully—you must hear from other people. If you are not brave enough to be seen participating, you cannot participate in earnest. Sometimes, that means admitting when you haven't followed through or made a mistake or changed your mind. Sometimes you have to do things in someone else’s way. We all want to belong to a village. We don’t really get excited over the actual act of being a villager. When you’re out of practice, it feels like a chore. The work of it is rarely fun, unless you work to make it fun. Going to a meeting. Dropping off food. Shoveling snow. Being subsumed into the collective labor of something larger than yourself does not reward any individual genius or big, unfinished plans.
Community does always not form in the ways you expect, but the raw materials of persistence and labor and care are unmistakable. It’s way easier to collect interesting ideas than to take up the work. It’s a trap, the same way the piles of fabric and patterns sitting unused on my shelf are a trap: they don’t signify or satisfy unless you put in the labor of cutting and pressing and sewing. I told myself this year I wouldn’t buy more until I finished some projects of my own. I am tired of feeling guilty about my own potential energy. It’s not just unfinished sewing projects that make me feel frayed, but they don’t help. The only solution to this problem is to set aside the time to complete them.
When I teach French seams, I do it in 60 seconds, sleight of hand, as agile as a magician. Then I show how to do it, slowly sewing the wrong sides together and then flipping it inside out, the raw edges encased in a narrow channel inside. It typically takes an hour to learn, feeling and adjusting and pinning and pressing. At the end, students realize how little the visible stitches contribute to the process. The hand does so much before you ever punch the needle through the fabric. The labor becomes immediately accessible in practice. That’s the real reason I start lessons the so-called hard way. It’s not that hard when you actually do it. It just takes time, and willingness to mess it up.
Sitting in my mending booth, for eight profoundly unsexy hours, people bring me overlong hems and ripped jeans. They ask about unravelling knitwear my sewing machine cannot improve. As a rule, people love the idea of making clothing, and hate to engage in its maintenance. Transmuting this private skill into a public practice is not a particularly smooth process. People are perplexed that they have to pay for the service, even as the skilled labor with complex machinery is performed right in front of them like a magic trick. Explaining why it’s worth it to pay to tailor a free pair of pants from a clothing swap is tricky, even for a sustainability-minded audience. I sew on a fair amount of buttons. It’s faster by hand.
Sewing by machine in many ways is not much faster or neater than sewing without. What people find impressive depends on what they’ve tried to do themselves. I can sew the same t-shirt pattern on a machine in three hours, and by hand in five. I did the latter last weekend, sitting comfortably and silently in an armchair while it snowed a foot outside. It’s a pleasant way to spend a few hours, but still, there’s no skipping the time-consuming steps of cutting, pinning, ironing. Shortcuts can only save you some certain kinds of work. I do love the way the heat of my fingers presses the cotton into satisfyingly crisp folds while I work.
Kurt Vonnegut has a great bit, oft-quoted from a PBS interview and other places, about going out into the world to buy a single envelope. He could just order them in bulk, of course he could, but he says, “I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And ask a woman what kind of dog that is. . .” The shortcut belies the point—sometimes a bit of extra effort and engagement, however supposedly tiresome, enriches a process that would otherwise be impoverished in our lives. Grounding my life in inconvenient routines has somehow made writing sentences less painful, I’ll give my friends that. The way the fabric of my life intersects with others is now a weave through my weeks, holding me fast.
When I handsewed that white cotton t-shirt, it was meant to demonstrate the process for a workshop, with bright cobalt contrast thread and running stitches. Upon request, I made the sewing big and wide and visible, even as I closed my edges neatly into French seam channels. The organizers wanted to be able to see and show the work to prospective students. From the outside, it’s hard to reconcile my usual goal of invisible hand stitching with the process of learning. The labor this time is for show. Sometimes effort is neither a big deal nor a lot of work—it is simply persistence, made manifest. I enjoyed that snowy Sunday. After I finished but before I sent the photos, the workshop was accepted after all, without the sample. Sometimes you have to do it someone else’s way to get where you’re going next. If you’d like to learn how to sew a t-shirt with a handful of strangers on a chilly little island this fall, you know where to find me. I’ll teach you how to sew a French seam and take your time with it.
Phenology1 Lately: Ice so crusted over the dog can dance on it, fat rabbits emerging out of their burrows, one lone deer grazing on dropped bird seed, the return of the woodpecker as alarm clock, foxes barking beyond the bog, one lone possum taking an afternoon stroll on the salted road.
Wearing Lately: Giant button down shirts in linen and cotton over silk thermals, Oddobody teeshirts and leotards, secondhand wool pants from St. Johns Bay and James Street, cashmere socks from Quince and wool socks from Keepsake, Negative Underwear’s slightly sexy sheet turtleneck, an old speckled white wool Aran Guernsey I bought in Dublin, a sheer lace pencil skirt and blouse I bought myself for Christmas from Doen and have been deploying strategically for endorphins, a black suede pair of vintage Ferragamo pumps that look as modern as an Instagram editorial, a grey Persian lamb pillbox I bought in Italy when it was still sweltering on an impulse. It was a good impulse!
Reading Lately: Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel, Eager: The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter by Ben Goldfarb, Seeing Through Clothes by Anne Hollander. Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952-1964, Changes in the Land by William Cronon, Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert MacFarlane, Indian New England Before the Mayflower by Howard S. Russell
Phenology, also known as observational biology, is “the study of periodic events in biological life cycles and how these are influenced by seasonal and interannual variations in climate…Examples include the date of emergence of leaves and flowers, the first flight of butterflies, the first appearance of migratory birds, the date of leaf coloring and fall in deciduous trees…” Thank you, Wikipedia. The transcendentalists loved, and folks who know me from Twitter will know that the Morning Report started as brief, daily phenological reports. It seems like a nice way to preserve the spirit of the thing.
Haley! As someone who a) recently bought a sewing machine with high hopes to learn (!!), and b) has been thinking about how to show up in community and not just talk about it, I loved belatedly reading this. I spent several days in Western NC a few weeks after Helene, and while the big heroic acts (chainsaws, mule packing, etc) made the news, it was the ongoing, quotidian daily efforts (“persistence made manifest”) that really helped keep community afloat for weeks after the storm receded.
Such a lovely, thoughtful essay