After nearly nine years, I’m resurrecting this space to write about the intersections between poetry and my new practice, embroidery.
I don’t exactly know what to say about it right this moment, except that I feel excited about learning something new, something unexpected, something completely outside of my wheelhouse, but deeply reminiscent of women’s work that I observed in my grandmothers’ living rooms as a child.
As I make my way through this sampler, one stitch at a time, I find myself in a sort of dialogue with poetry: repetition of stitches as an approximation of rhythm and rhyme; a material’s edge as a line break; surrounding cloth as white space; stitch names as sources of rich etymological association. The tools of this craft lend themselves to further literary comparisons: the thread as metaphor for the passage of time; the hoop as a formal constraint that yields surprise, the needle for a pen.
A summer sampler
I have always struggled with a type of imposter syndrome as a writer, underestimating my own poetic craft within a competitive publishing context; with this new interest in textiles, I feel determined to allow myself to prioritise the act of making as its own reward; to articulate this modality as serious play; and to reframe the act and its product as a type of important cultural memory making, in conversation with others, in the present and past.
After practicing on the sampler, I played with the learned techniques using materials in the home, fabric I brought back from Japan (1986) and India (1999) and rag paper I had in a cupboard. I’m enjoying my role as a beginner and the freedom that comes with that. Please see the ‘Stitches’ tab on this site for a little chronicle of my work/play.