Sewing is fantasy fiction’s least favorite activity. How many times has a Strong Female Character proved her agency and ability by hating her needlework? The heroine is not like other girls! She disdains embroidery; she likes to fight and ride horses, like boys do. In the Game of Thrones series, for example, fan favorite Arya rejects needlework for Needle, her sword. Plying her Needle becomes an elaborate joke on societal expectations for women in Westeros, at once a refutation and denigration of traditionally feminine activities, as well as a reflection of the fates of Arya and her more traditionally feminine sister Sansa in the first book. Sansa is imprisoned; Arya escapes.
This surface feminism makes a glibly believable case: sewing filled the lives of many historical women, especially those from Western Europe in the middle ages, Renaissance, and long nineteenth century, the periods which inspired a plurality of fantasy universes. It is a task that requires time and sustained concentration, usually indoors, and usually seated. Surely that means that sewing is neither activity nor art, but a visible sign of female oppression and limitation? Indeed, in The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, Rozsika Parker points out that working with thread is, within Western European cultures, not art or work (even though women have traditionally and historically called embroidery ‘work’), but “entirely… the expression of femininity.” But to then entirely reject sewing is to reject a secret history of feminine expression and community, and to deny that for many historical women, sewing allowed them the space to think and work, as well as an art form that allowed them to create and to convey meaning when other methods of self-expression were barred from them. This makes female authors who do integrate female needlework into their fantasy novels surprisingly subversive.
Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle is a study in subversion. The book is a refutation of traditionally misogynist narratives, from John Donne’s “Go and Catch a Falling Star,” to fairy tales. Sophie Hatter, the eldest of three, believes that traditional narratives will completely determine her life, and that nothing she says will alter it—little knowing that she can enact magic just by speaking. The stories told to her don’t come true; the stories she tells do instead. The first inkling we have of Sophie’s magical powers are when she’s sewing trimmings onto hats (something she “quite liked doing”) and making up stories about the wearers that eventually come true. After she’s cursed into aging several decades in an instant, Sophie finds work using a traditionally feminine skillset: cooking, cleaning, and sewing. In them, she finds her own power. She saves a trapped dog that previously could have frightened her with her sewing scissors; she sews charms into a suit of Howl’s that another magician notices— an important clue that helps Sophie realize she has magical powers of her own. Sewing allows Sophie not just a space in which to enact and practice her powers, but time to think and reflect on her problems— turning sewing into a meditative practice, a description I’ve heard used by many modern day sewers.
Buy the Book
The Empress of Salt and Fortune
Tamora Pierce likewise considers thread as a space for female characters to control and practice their powers. In Sandry’s Book, titular Sandry keeps herself calm while trapped in a windowless storeroom by embroidering, and then first enacts magic by inviting a candle flame into braided thread. But for Sandry, thread magic evolves from solitary practice to community formation. At the climax of the book, Sandry is once again trapped in the dark, unable to escape. This time, however, she has her three closest friends with her. She weaves together threads of magic from herself and the others, enabling them to combine their skills and talents and ride out an earthquake to safety.
Pierce’s Song of the Lioness series offers a more straightforward subversion of this trope. Heroine Alanna decides to disguise herself as a boy and train as a knight because she can’t stand going to a convent to learn “sewing and dancing… as if that’s all I can do with myself,” thus defining feminine activity as a means of restriction. All activities permitted to a lady are a means of limiting her power. However, Alanna’s relationship with and understanding of femininity shifts from an outright rejection to appreciation as she ages. In the third book, The Woman Who Rides Like a Man, Alanna decides that learning to weave—an activity that her two female apprentices characterize as something “all girls were taught”—would be fun. Alanna enjoys it. And when her male apprentice denigrates weaving as “women’s work,” only “alright if you have nothing better to do,” Alanna uses thread magic to literally pull the rug out from under him. Alanna then defends working with thread as a valuable way of channeling magic—one different from her own method, of pulling from the inner reserve of her Gift, to cast fighting magic through her sword, but nonetheless valuable. Alanna, who learned thread magic from her village healing-woman, adds that “a woman with a bit of string in her hands can bring down a troop of armed knights, if her will is strong enough.” As Alanna explained earlier, “The source of all your magic lies in your own will.” Working with thread becomes not just a shared feminine skill, the teaching of which forms communities, but a feminine way of enacting one’s will set up as equal, in power, utility, and difficulty, as more masculinized forms of magic, like talking to demons and seeing the future.
The TV miniseries of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell offers another interesting take on embroidery as a means of female communication. In a subplot in the third episode, “The Education of a Magician.” Lady Pole is powerless, almost literally voiceless, thanks to an enchantment from the Gentleman with the Thistledown Hair. She spends half her life— her nights— trapped in Faerie. When she tries to explain the curse she is under, she can’t. The Gentleman has cursed her to relay nonsense stories instead. So, unable to speak, Lady Pole turns to the traditional form of female self-expression: embroidery. She tears up her gowns (one of which is, quite pointedly, her wedding gown, implying that her marriage has led to this state of constant nocturnal suffering and an inability to speak of it). When her friend, Mrs. Strange asks, “Who do you sew for?” and Lady Pole replies, “For you.” Embroidery thereby becomes a means of not just feminine self-expression but female communication, one Lady Pole expects another woman to immediately understand in ways men can or could not.
Tying needlework to magic makes explicit the implicit value of working with thread for women historically: a space, and a work of their own, through which they form community and can gain mastery. The particular cultural heft of needlework being a particularly and peculiarly feminine mode of expression means that rejecting it means rejecting all the meanings that women were able to bring to it because it was uniquely coded as theirs. Subvert the stitch, fantasy authors. If you look at textiles as text, a whole world of female interiority and community opens up for you, allowing a deeper exploration of historically-informed feminine experience.
Elyse Martin is a Chinese-American Smith College graduate who lives in Washington DC with her husband and two cats. She writes reviews for Publisher’s Weekly, and her essays and humor pieces have appeared in The Toast, Electric Literature, Perspectives on History, The Bias, Entropy Magazine, and Smithsonian Magazine. She spends most of her time writing and making atrocious puns—sometimes simultaneously—and tweets @champs_elyse. She’s at work on several novels.
Very interesting indeed.
What keeps striking me these days is that textile crafts have an incredible amount of mathematics in them – heck, I got into sewing because I already enjoyed knitting, and I’d taken up knitting because I’ve always loved math (and am fidgety). It’s pretty much all playing with geometry/topology/algebra, and depending on what you’re doing there might also be trigonometry or calculus or who knows what else. There are interesting puzzles everywhere. I keep considering what needs to be assumed, doubly erroneously, for anyone to believe simultaneously than women should supposedly stick to needlework and that women supposedly aren’t well-suited to mathematical things.
Seid magic, the art of female magic users in Norse tradition, was based on textile work. A woman spun her spells and wove her magic. Even Valkyries used their looms to make war magic.
Women’s textile work was a vital economic activity in the days before ready to wear and department stores, as well as being a form of self expression and artistry. Women as powerful as Elizabeth I and her ambitious and successful subject Bess of Hardwick enjoyed fine needlework and took pride in their skill. Denigrating textile work is falling in with the old misogynistic tradition of dissing ‘women’s work’. It is very unfeminist.
@2 I can’t remember where I read it, but there was a book that pointed out how absurd it would be for men to ride off to war without trousers. Yet the smith is honored more than the seamstress.
Textile work was also critical for the space program and early computers. Spacesuits had hand-stitching in the tricky bits and I think the wiring for early computers greatly resembled knitting.
While textiles were among the first manufacturing to be mechanized, even now it resists automation. IRRC, sewing is too variable for robots so they still need people to operate sewing machines.
I have never understood why far too many authors assume that for a story to be Feminist their lead character must be as masculine as possible; Women have their own powers & principalities as assuredly as Men do and I see no reason to abandon them even as the Fairer Sex seek out new fresh conquests & other challenges!
In Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings, Lady Mira is renowned for her embroidery work, mostly stitching pictures of Mata Zyndu, hegemon of all Dara. She has an interesting reflection:
To this Mata Zyndu mocks by implaying the comparision is ridiculus due to the sheer change of scale. To which Mira replies:
I also wish fantasy authors working in a European-medieval inspired setting would admit that needlework was not universally considered “only for women.” This is from a contemporary account of Henry II Curtmantle: “Henry also had a good sense of humour and was never upset at being the butt of the joke. Once while he sat sulking and occupying himself with needlework, a courtier suggested that he looked like a tanner’s daughter. The King rocked with laughter and even explained the joke to those who did not immediately grasp it.” Even though Henry II is widely described as athletic, impatient, and a total man’s man, everyone was stuck indoors over the winter and did productive things with their time.
So many historical needleworks also commemorated life events. If you read some of them, you’ll find memorials to infants lost, horrifying tales of abuse and rape often couched in careful wording — for many women the only way they could speak of things. Women were sometimes not even supposed to dwell on children lost in miscarriage or infancy, sometimes not even allowed a note in history beyond “baby lastname.”
I learned to sew and embroider as a child, but as a young mother, those skills turned into lifesavers. I loved making my young daughter’s hand decorated wardrobe (smocking and embroidery)–every stitch part of the love I poured into caring for her. I picked up knitting, crochet, and needlepoint, because that square inch or so of work didn’t disappear in minutes or hours as did everything else I did–it absolutely saved my sanity. I could keep fingers busy and let my mind soar. I am a multiple degreed professional fortunate enough to have cared for my young children full time. Sewing all of my wardrobe and my daughter’s, and much of what my 2 sons wore, was one of the ways we could afford that. Cooked every single thing from scratch, too, and could still manage just fine on a SNAP budget–although I’ve not had to pinch every penny in decades. I rejoined the workforce when #3 entered preschool, and have been quite competitive during my career. I still love relaxing with knitting or sewing. There’s been plenty of drudgery in my life, but it didn’t happen with a needle in my hand.
Not SFF, but one of the two heroines in The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Waite is a talented embroiderer and designer who must be convinced that her work qualifies as art.
#4: Nonbinary folks have their own powers and principalities also–and this one wishes they had learned more sewing skills earlier on.
@3 The Sharing Knife
@3 and @12 Yep. Found it in a discussion over the usefulness of arrows vs. trousers:
““I still don’t agree. I’d want my trousers. In fact, if I were waked up out of my bedroll in a night attack, I think I’d go for them before my boots or my bow.” “But patrollers sleep in their trousers, in camp,” she objected. …. “That gives you a measure of importance, then, doesn’t it?” He batted his eyes at her. “I can just picture it, a whole patrol riding out armed to the teeth, all bare-assed. Do you have any idea what the jouncing in those saddles would do to all our tender bits? We’d never make it to the malice.”
Bujold, Lois McMaster. Legacy (The Sharing Knife, Book 2) (The Wide Green World Series) (p. 302). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
This is true not just in fictional works but in historical depictions of contemporary “real life” (for whatever value of “real life” you get out of historical literature). Any literary depiction of enough length describing a contemporary woman of any social class, from slave to queen, prior to the late eighteenth century will at some point depict her spinning, weaving, or sewing. For example, the Odyssey depicts both Circe (a goddess/nymph) and Penelope (a queen) weaving. It was ubiquitously regarded as definitively “women’s work”.
There was a concern among early economists (Adam Smith and his contemporaries) that the mechanization of the textile industry would lead to the mass unemployment of professional weavers. It caused a bit of consternation when the number of professional weavers actually increased dramatically after mechanization. What they failed to take into account was the number of unpaid weavers who stopped practicing the trade, women who wove for their own households and who suddenly found it more efficient to buy cheap, machine-woven textiles and devote their time to other tasks. In other words a required necessity was transformed into an optional pursuit.
I read once that child mortality dropped in Scotland when the spinning wheel was introduced there because it greatly increased the amount of warm clothing and thick coats available to people (spindles are much slower). Cloth production also meant things ranging from sails for ships to bandages for the wounded.
Grandma Moses is famous for taking up painting late in life but she’d been honing her craft for years in needlework, only turning to painting when she couldn’t sew. The same skill went into both but the one was more easily recognized as art.
Also, have to throw in one more Diana Wynne Jones example. In The Merlin Conspiracy (spoilers ahead), a character passes through a city where everyone wears elaborately embroidered fabrics. But, the people who produce them are a low status, mistreated caste. When he assures them their work could sell for large amounts elsewhere, they pack up and leave. The city’s economy collapses.
So, all you fiction writers, stop disrespecting the people who do all the sewing and embroidery before it’s too late!
Diana Wynne Jones, The Spellcoats. I have always loved this book.
Was this essay inspired at all by the current vast surge of people sewing cloth face masks, for themselves and others, to reduce the spread of COVID-19? Talk about lifesaving needlework.
Magical and non-magical needlework is found elsewhere in Tamora Pierce’s books as well. Another form of thread magic is practiced in Tortall, prominently by Famer Cape, an unconventional and oft-underestimated male mage who sometimes stores his power in embroidery where nobody knows to look for it. And there’s Lalasa, a shy and long-abused young woman greatly skilled at needlework, who becomes a high-end seamstress and self-defense teacher with help from the heroine Keladry while remaining very ‘feminine.’
Yes, Arya escapes when Sansa doesn’t, largely thanks to her sword and her swordfighting-teacher. But in the books at least, Sansa is shown to be no less intelligent and strong in her way, and it’s arguably likely that neither sister would have survived what the other subsequently endured. This might not be the place for debating that subject, though.
Not SFF, but Madame Defarge certainly demonstrates that members of the patriarchy ignored the possibilities of skilled needlework at their own peril.
And of course in Greek mythology each mortal’s life was defined, or at least measured and constrained, by a spun thread.
“They call them seamstresses, hem, hem.”
This mirrors one of the many delicious reasons I love Steven Brust’s Dragaera series.
One of most righteous, moral, thoughtful, manly man characters, based on Athos in Brust’s Alexandre Dumas- inspired historical fiction written within this series, passes his time by….wait for it….crocheting.
Every character in these books can be anywhere on feminine to masculine scale, and can have any strengths, interests and hobbies anywhere on that scale as well, as far as I can tell.
“Róndola” is a 2018 spanish humorous fantasy novel about a group of princesses who had studied sewing together for more than a decade, and now it’s some kind of superpower on them.
Homer’s queens and goddesses all weave and spin, as mentioned up-thread; Penelope cunningly holds off her suitors by asserting that she has to weave a shroud for her current father-in-law before she can go off and marry another man. She weaves by day and unpicks by night for three years; and is only found out when one of her maids betrays her. She does not just passively wait at home for Odysseus to show up, she protects herself, her son, and her home.
Also in Homer, the gift of a cloak or a dress is mentioned alongside silver bowls, horses and other luxury items.
In another story, when Philomele is raped by her sister’s husband, who cuts out her tongue to keep her quiet, she tells her sister the story in weaving, and the sister takes a bloody revenge by killing their son. The three adults are then turned into birds.
@19: LOL
@22 YES! When I saw this discussion pop up in my inbox, my immediate thought was ‘Penelope. Someone had better mention Penelope.’
There are several instances in Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar series that show women (and some men) sewing.
One example of a fantasy heroine I loved being a valued seamstress was Karen Memery, a teenage prostitute (taxed AS a “seamstress” by local regulations) on the frontier who loved sewing and actually turned a steampunk sewing machine into a combat rig. Her femme-ness was celebrated, rather than berated, in the book. Elizabeth Bear is the author and I believe in one interview, she said writing the character’s delight in making clothing was harder than she thought because “Karen is a femme, and I am not.”
I also really enjoyed reading Paladin’s Grace by T. Kingfisher, because the aforementioned (male) paladin is a knitter of socks. He justifies it by saying a lot of soldiering involves waiting, and a soldier can never have too many pairs of sturdy socks.
Yes! I’ve been doing needlework since I was 12 years old and it has a huge part of my life; right next to reading SF/F books! I loved Suzanne Clark’s use of sewing, as mentioned above.
One other to add to the list is Juiliet Marillier’s ‘Daughter of the Forest’. In this re-telling our lead gal has to sew clothing for her brothers (who were turned into swans) in over to save them. And of course, because this is fantasy after all, it’s not as ‘simple’ as just any clothing being sewn.
A fairy tale covered on this very site involved a king who fell in love with a commoner who insisted he learn a paying skill in case they ever lose their throne. He picks weaving and becomes very good at it. When he’s kidnapped he persuaded his captors to sell his work which his queen instantly recognizes and launches the necessary rescue.
@27, as I recall from the fairy tale the novel is based on the sister has to see the shirts from flowers. I always wondered how that would work.
Daughter of the Forest is based on the version of “The Six Swans” where the girl must weave shirts from nettles. It calls the plant “starwort,” which seems to be either stinging nettle (though I haven’t seen that name applied to that species anywhere else) or something similar.
@3ff: just so. My reaction to
was that the punishment was far too mild; if she had that kind of thread control she might have unwoven his clothes.
I wonder how many fictional heroines who walk away from needlework are walking away from the purely decorative forms (e.g. embroidery) rather than the ones with some practical effect? (Yes, I’m ignoring the uses shown above for covert messaging via embroidery; that seems a special case.) ISTM there’s a trope-bordering-on-cliché about doing decoration and gossip in some separate room — but it’s not clear how much that had to do with medieval reality.
@30: Sandry does that later in the Emelan series complex. When a group of people kidnap her, she makes all of their clothing fuse or unravel and re-weave to tightly cocoon and gag them. When a group of men on horseback try to attack her, she simply unravels their cloth garments along with the stitches in their leather garments, armor, saddles, and weapon hilts.
Dragon Slippers and Dragon Flight by Jessica Day George have a seamstress heroine with a talent for embroidery. (The series is marketed for children though I enjoyed it as an adult.)
Sing the Four Quarters by Tanya Huff mentions knitting socks by men and women as a useful way to pass the time on a boat journey.
PC Hodgell in her wonderful Kencyrath series uses embroidery for great effect. The protagonist, a tomboy girl who grew apart of her people, violently rejects being forced into the female world. Only latterly does she discovers the hidden power in that world — and how the women used embroidery as a secret code for communication in the face of misogynistic oppression.
Speaking as a man who enjoys needlework, I’m pleased to see there are some mentions of such mad things in the comments above. I’d love to know if there was a book where it was a central theme. Or maybe I’ll have to write it.
Re : The spellcoats by Diana Wynne Jones had very powerful weaving Magic. She wove the whole story and even retold the story of the Evil Sorcerer that was his clothing and only by leaving out part she couldn’t see was the Curse not reinforced. (This is the recollections of having read this a few times many years ago. I consider it the strongest books of that series, in contrast to many other opinions). Yes, I finished my first mask today. I also have other needlework skills including tatting, embroidery, basic knitting, crochet and creating with all the skills for Barbie.
As a bit of an amateur weaver myself (I have a tiny back-strap loom!), I was so excited to see this article!
One other example that comes to mind is from Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, where (if I remember correctly) the grandmother snipped and stitched the boy’s coat to change his past.
@33 I was thinking of the sister-kin embroidery, too.
“If I were to tell the Highlord what those knots say…” Rawneth began defiantly.
“Would you indeed, and betray the very heart of the Women’s World? What Adiraina writes in the love-knots of this old letter is meant for me alone.”
There’s also the death banners in that series, in which portraits of their dead are woven from the clothing they died in.
The Knight and Rogue series by Hillari Bell has a male needleworker as a hero. After his father dies,he supplements the family income by training as a thief. When he is caught,an unusual Young nobleman buys him and they have all sorts of adventures.
One interesting historical fact is the secret woman’s language called nüshu. It was a form of script used in Asia for women to communicate secretly with other women.They were forbidden to read and write, so developed their own script which was often concealed into embroidery patterns or concealed in the borders of art. They would weave it into textiles as well. It offered a way to stay in contact with friends and relatives after marriage. They often wound up in a new place, knowing no one and unable to leave the husbands home. This way they could stay in contact.
Another example of a needleworker, emphasis on worker, from Diana Wynne Jones is in Drowned Ammet – Mitt’s mother, who embroiders for the rich on an industrial scale in something resembling the ’embroidery factories’ she snarked about in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland.
And of course there’s Arha/Tenar from the Earthsea books, who learns to weave as a child priestess in the Place of the Tombs and continues to do so as a Gontish farmer’s wife – it even inspires her Hardic use-name, Goha – and then as a widowed farmer, but runs into trouble when she momentarily contemplates apprenticing her disabled foster-daughter Therru to a (male) weaver as a trade that would keep her away from people’s prejudices by keeping her out of sight.
A male stitcher in Melissa Scott’s Astreiant novels is Philip Eslingen, who doesn’t do fancy needlework but who can keep his wardrobe in good order because he knows how to darn and sew (and a wardrobe kept in good order is important to Philip, who’s a bit of a clotheshorse). He explains at one point that it’s a practical necessity for a soldier to be able to mend his own kit. And occasionally iron it.
Barry Deutsch’s graphic novel Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword (subtitled: “Yet Another Troll-Fighting 11-Year-Old Orthodox Jewish Girl”) shows her balancing on a giant ball of yarn on the front cover – the knitting lessons from her stepmother turn out to have been VERY important when she goes to outwit the giant troll who has the sword she wants!
Madam DeFarge made use of her ‘knitted registers’ to keep records in way that the authorities did not recognize.
Counted cross-stitch was used to form coded messages in the Quicksilver trilogy.
And then there’s Theo Waitley, who used a form of crochet to help her think Strange Thoughts about math in Fledgling and Saltation.
@1, allthewayupstate
Very interesting indeed.
What keeps striking me these days is that textile crafts have an incredible amount of mathematics in them – heck, I got into sewing because I already enjoyed knitting, and I’d taken up knitting because I’ve always loved math (and am fidgety). It’s pretty much all playing with geometry/topology/algebra, and depending on what you’re doing there might also be trigonometry or calculus or who knows what else. There are interesting puzzles everywhere. I keep considering what needs to be assumed, doubly erroneously, for anyone to believe simultaneously than women should supposedly stick to needlework and that women supposedly aren’t well-suited to mathematical things.
From Lee and Miller’s Saltation:
She glanced up. Peering at her from the next row was the instructor herself, Pilot Truffant. “No, Trainee, please don’t let me interrupt your work. I’m sure it must be fascinating.”
Theo felt her face warm, but she had, she thought, earned some sarcasm. After all, it wasn’t very advertent to be discovered doing needlework in math class. The low laughter of her classmates didn’t help. She took a breath and answered her instructor calmly. “Yes, Pilot.”
The instructor moved closer. “Good, good. We’d hate for you to be bored, her at Anlingdin. Perhaps you’ll be kind enough to explain why, in the face of your incoming scores, you find this a compelling way to follow up on a drill.”
“Yes, Pilot,” Theo said. “I was thinking about the last question on the drill. The work here,” she raised the unfinished lacework, “was helping me think.”
“Very good. The needle-and-haystack approach to space navigation, I take in?”
Theo looked at the instructor. She seemed more amused than taunting. “I’m not familiar with the term,” Theo admitted, while some few in the class sputtered. “But, on the drill, there was the answer I thought you wanted, and then there was the second answer. I needed—”
“Enough!” But Theo had already stopped, obedient to Pilot Truffant’s hand-talked stop. “You intrigue, Waitley. Please hold your work a moment.” The instructor turned to the larger class. “The rest of you are done with the drill. How many were concerned about the ‘second answer’?” No one moved or spoke; the instructor glanced down at her handheld readout and said finally, “This is excellent. All of you have the final answer right. I salute!”
She fit action to words, saluting in all directions, and then leaned towards Theo, face intent. “The answer I expected is the one you gave,” she said quietly. “Now, what your needle say about the second answer?”
Theo looked down at her work, and then up at the instructor again, grimacing as she tried to put words to thoughts. “The easy answer,” she said after a moment—“That answer is missing a dimension, somehow. That is, it is right as far as it goes, so I’m glad I have that. But we’re—see, the string contraction effect needs to be in here; it may be negligible on a clean-paper arithmetic run but can’t assume that’s what we have and—”
The hand-talked sharp though hold mouth hold came quickly, and then: “Enough, Waitley, enough. You anticipate a lesson some days in the future. I hope you’ll have time after the lab to discuss your cloth computer with me….
Truffant cleared the lab stuff away cheerfully, and then insisted: “Really, I’d like you to show me that other solution you were working on. I’ve banned an abacus, an antique slide-stick, three kinds of subvocal calculators, and a pet norbear from class in the past. Now I wonder if I have to ban needles and string.”
I used my sewing skills to make a Klein bottle when I was in college. I just wasn’t grasping the description in the textbook, so I pulled out fabric and stitched one up. The flexibility of the cloth was invaluable in letting me manipulate the shape until I had a clear understanding of exactly what was going on.
I have long considered my sewing skills to be one of my most valuable tools in taking control of my environment.
@@@@@ 44. Vatch:
If you have a Klein bottle, you need a Klein bottle opener.
https://www.kleintools.com/catalog/branded-collection/klein-bottle-opener
>>Tying needlework to magic makes explicit the implicit value of working with thread for women historically: a space, and a work of their own, through which they form community and can gain mastery. The particular cultural heft of needlework being a particularly and peculiarly feminine mode of expression means that rejecting it means rejecting all the meanings that women were able to bring to it because it was uniquely coded as theirs.
Very well put.
Also, did you know that traditionally, for harvesting saffron, the most expensive spice in the world, only women were employed. Reportedly, the work required such delicacy and fine motor skills that it was reserved for women, who were expected to benefit from their previous training in sewing.