A Life Stitched Together

In my article The Lost Art of Making Things, I told you a little about learning to crochet and sew as a girl, about the nuns at the convent and a crooked pair of jeans I made myself at seventeen. What I want to share in this blog post is that making things has given me a great deal more than a wardrobe full of imperfect handmade clothes over the years, it has shaped the way I think, the way I handle a tight budget, and the way I find calm when everything else feels out of my control, and I think those benefits are worth pulling apart properly, one story at a time.

Imagination needs nothing but permission

Before any of that crochet or sewing began, there was a wooden spoon. I was staying at my nonna's, with no toys of my own there, and I found the spoon in her kitchen and decided it would do very well as a doll. I dressed her in cloth napkins pulled from my nonna's drawers, tied on with ribbon, and gave her a face, eyes, a nose, a mouth, drawn onto the round part of the spoon that stood in so easily for a head. My nonna laughed when she saw what I had made, and I remember feeling rather proud of her all the same. My brother and I did this constantly, turning cardboard boxes, shells, whatever we could find lying about, into whatever our imaginations needed them to be that particular afternoon, and looking back, I think this is where the real benefit of making things begins, long before any skill is involved at all, simply the permission to look at ordinary objects and see something else entirely. Children do this naturally, and I suspect the reason so many adults believe they cannot make things is not a lack of ability but a lack of practice at giving themselves that same permission.

Patience is a skill someone has to teach you

For my first real job I began working in a boutique in my town, among the services offered to clients the boutique offered alterations, and for this purpose the shop employed a proper seamstress who took the time to teach me a great deal. I still remember her patience, and one particular trick she taught me has stayed with me for the rest of my life, pinning cut pattern pieces tightly together rather than basting them first, a small shortcut I still use today without even thinking about it. What I value most about that time, though, is not the technique itself but the lesson underneath it, that patience with a slow, careful process is not something you are simply born with, it is something someone models for you until it becomes your own habit, and once you have that habit it tends to spill over into everything else you do, cooking, gardening, even the way you approach a difficult conversation.

Making things sharpens the mind for more than making

Making things followed me into my working life as well, in ways I did not expect until I sat down to think about it properly. I made games with my students, Christmas tree decorations, whatever the classroom or the season called for. For a few years I also ran a holiday program, and the children and I spent a great deal of time on arts and crafts, making costumes and whatever else we needed out of scrap materials and anything the school happened to have on hand, since there was rarely much money for anything more specialised. Later, as an academic teaching technology in education, I no longer made things with my hands in quite the same way, but I have come to think there is a genuine link between the two, the ability to see how a pattern fits together, in what order pieces need to be cut, joined and finished so the whole thing holds properly, is not so very different from the kind of clear, logical thinking that planning and building anything with technology also demands. I suspect the same part of my mind has always been doing the work, whether the material in front of me was fabric and thread or something altogether more abstract, and I would encourage anyone who thinks of making things as separate from their working life to look a little more closely at whether that is really true.

Necessity does not have to feel like deprivation

When I arrived in Australia, money was tight, and I made a great many of my own clothes and my children's clothes as a matter of course. I never found this stressful or felt it as any kind of hardship, since I have always loved sewing, and making things for myself and for my children simply felt like having something special as it was uniquely made by me rather than doing without, and I think that difference in attitude matters more than people realise. Making things out of necessity can feel like deprivation if you let it, or it can feel like simple resourcefulness if you allow yourself to actually enjoy the process, and I have always found that the second way of thinking makes a tight budget a great deal easier to live with than the first.

Something made just for you

Among everything I have sewn for myself over the years, one piece stands out with particular fondness, a gorgeous purple taffeta evening skirt, which I wore to special occasions and even took on a cruise with me, for one of those elegant evening cruise dinners. My latest project for something special just for me has been a bag made from a pair of old jeans I no longer wore.

I kept the back pocket exactly as it was and turned it into an outer pocket, repurposed a belt loop to help it close, and lined it with a bright, patterned fabric that peeks out at the top against all that dark denim, and I even added a small handmade tag that reads, quite simply, made just for me.

There is a particular kind of satisfaction in making something with no audience in mind at all, no gift to give, no child to dress, nothing except your own pleasure in the result, and I think it is worth remembering that making things does not always need a practical justification to be worthwhile.

What all of this adds up to

Looking back across all of it, the wooden spoon doll, the boutique and the seamstress, the classroom crafts, the early years in Australia, the taffeta skirt and now a denim bag decades later, I do not think the benefit of making things has ever really been about the objects themselves. It has been about permission, patience, the way a certain kind of thinking transfers into everything else you do, and the simple pleasure of making something exist that did not exist before, whether anyone else ever sees it or not. And so, if you have not yet read my article The Lost Art of Making Things, do check it out, as it will show you why I believe making things matters so much.

Grazia