The pleasure of working by hand

Adding vintage embroidery to a new pillowcase

I spent the morning covering a pillow with vintage fabric, likely from the 1930s. I stitched the seams by hand, unreasonably happy when it was done.

This evening I stitched some vintage needlework, probably from the 1960s, onto new pillowcases. The whites don’t match exactly,  but that’s part of the charm, I think.

I love sewing by hand.

I find it meditative, soothing, calming. I think of the women, going back centuries, likely millennia, who used their needles and thread — whether a bone needle lacing dried gut or a gold needle sewing silk by a 17th. century fireside — and feel connected to them, and to the long history of domestic arts, no matter how simple my attempts may be.

I have a sewing box. In it are spools of thread, hundreds of antique buttons of mother-of-pearl and brass and glass I keep collecting, with no specific use in mind. I just find them lovely to look at and to touch. I don’t use a thimble so I often prick my fingers. I have, and use, pins, stabbing them into a little pin-cushion I’ve had since childhood, now impossibly politically incorrect — a pillow of red silk encircled by tiny Chinamen holding hands.

It feels good to disconnect from metal and plastic — Ipods, Ipads, the phone, and, most of all, the computer that makes me feel like a cow attached to a milking machine (all production, all the time!) — and re-connect with soft fabric. I wonder whose skin it touched, who designed it and printed it and wore it, where and when it was a part of their life before adding beauty to mine.

Now Jose is off pricing sewing machines for me…and turns out we’re part of a trend, among both men and women, reports The New York Times:

Once the domain of apron-clad matrons tasked with domestic busywork, sewing, like knitting before it, is making a comeback. At 3rd Ward, the number of monthly beginner classes has doubled to four. Purl in SoHo offers popular sewing seminars. The number of members at BurdaStyle, a five-year-old social network for sewing novices, grew to 753,184 in mid-May, an increase of 47 percent from a year earlier, the company said.

And sewing-machine sales are booming, with sales in the United States expected to top three million in 2012 at SVP Worldwide, the maker of Singer sewing machines, up from 1.5 million a year more than a decade ago.

While some of the craze can be chalked up to the popularity of reality television shows like “Project Runway,” sewing instructors say students in their 20s and 30s, particularly women, are embracing sewing also as a form of self-expression and a way to assert their independence.

“What once was considered a womanly task is now a way of defining oneself,” said Patti Gilstrap, an owner of Flirt, a clothing store in Brooklyn that teaches introductory classes in alteration and skirt making.

The other day, hoping to revive sun-faded fabric on a balcony pillow-cover, (vintage linen I’d bought in Paris), I soaked each piece in dye, one yellow, one deep blue, then hung them on the clothesline. It worked! I felt absurdly self-sufficient — $4 worth of dye, an hour of my time and a plastic bucket.

Pioneer Girl!

It’s too easy and expensive to just buy new stuff. I love it when I can restore older things and keep them in use.

What do you enjoy doing by hand?

Why Old Things Have Such Power

Image via Wikipedia

I’m no fan of things that are made of plastic or chrome, things that buzz and beep and demand my constant attention, let alone charge cords and batteries. I use them because they’re useful. They make work easier.

But I much prefer objects with patina, provenance, crazing, chips. Made of wood and stone and glass and porcelain, often worn smooth by others’ hands, cradled 100 or 200 or 500 years ago by someone long gone.

I admit it without embarrassment — buying antiques also allows me to own crystal and silver and beautifully made objects that don’t carry today’s retail prices.

I recently leafed through several worn black leather photo albums from 1912, awed by the women in their bonnets and boots, the men standing proudly beside the very latest in technology — a hand-cranked car, an airplane.

What were their lives like? How did their air smell? What music did they enjoy?

When I drink from a tea bowl from 1780 or sit on a chair made in 1850, I’m intimately connected to history. I’m a part of it — as we all are — but attaching myself, physically and emotionally, only to the shiny and new, is too seductive. It de facto erases the past; an “old” cellphone may be barely six months past its date of production.

I’m drawn, inexorably, to antiques, to items that have passed through history, whether from a distant farmhouse or shed or a merchant’s home or a trader or a teacher. I like the fact they are memento mori, the implicit reminder we’re all just passing through, borrowing — for a few decades — the objects we allow to define us and our taste to others.

For now I’ll enjoy them: rush-seated painted chairs; early gilt frames with bubbled glass; botanical prints; heavy silver forks and light-as-a-feather coin silver spoons; hand-woven rugs and linens. My most recent antiquing trip yielded terrific finds, from a large ironstone pitcher ($16) to a swath of mustard-colored charmeuse silk ($10.)

One of my latest acquisitions, found in Port Hope, Ontario, is a black painted wooden folk art horse, about a foot high and a foot long, beautifully hand-carved, standing on a base painted with the words “Souvenir de”.

That’s it.

A memory of….what? Did his creator lose interest? Forget? Die?

I love this omission. It gives me something to wonder about.