Below is a post I wrote for Restingmotion. I am cross-posting again because basically I am considering retiring this blog again and rolling everything back into a single space. I will still write about sewing and needlework, but under one heading. I very much think I broke everything out into separate boxes again just because I was generally struggling.
Anyway, let me know if you have thoughts, any thoughts.
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Somewhere around about the time of my last blog post my brain started working again. I felt as if a switch that had been jammed for a long time suddenly slipped back into position. It was that sudden. I was still tired, I was still recovering from my fourth cardiac procedure of the year, but suddenly it felt like a cloud had lifted and whatever remnants of my old self that were still hanging on stood up and listened,
As I was suddenly finding myself increasingly alive, increasingly doing, I also found that I stopped writing. I had no urge to write. As is evidenced by the erratic nature of this, or these, blogs over the last two years, this was part of an ongoing struggle. In many ways I write to make sense of who I am. And yet, in many ways the "me" in me was in hibernation. As that dormant part of myself began to reawaken, I found I needed time for reassessment and nesting. Writing would come in its own time.
Anyway, I am still here. I can honestly say the last 3 1/2 months have been the longest period of good, at least in terms of health, since July of 2020. I don't yet feel like I am out from under the mountain because the simple truth is that I was barely coping and there are tons of the daily stuff of life with which I was barely managing. I did what I needed to do. I tried to explore my creative instincts. I read a great deal, but I am not convinced that all the circuits in my brain were functioning. Of course they weren't functioning. My brain and my body were in siege-mode. I was doing what I needed to do to get through it all, and now I am dealing with the wreckage that surrounds me. But the wreckage is the past. All that matters is now.
I am a different person than I was on the eve of my 62nd birthday. Pain, cancer, heart issues, all these things changed me. And although we like to say that getting through these things is a journey, and when we come out on the other side we have achieved something, the truth is that for the most parts these are journeys we would really rather not take. We are changed. And parts of us are lost in the process. A part of who I was before has been erased, and a part of who I am today has yet to be discovered.
And yet, the need for an assessment prevails. Not an assessment of illness or health, nor necessarily either an accounting or an owning-up. I suppose I simply feel the urge to reflect on a few trends.
I read 83 books, fewer than in the previous few years. My reading slowed considerably in the last three months of the year and I found myself beset with an urge to reread, even books I had recently finished. I reconned this a shift in my mental landscape, perhaps an acknowledgement that something essential had been missing. This is not surprising. I have always been a collector of words and ideas, of books, not just a reader. For me reading is relationship, and a worthwhile relationship, like a good book, grows with the retelling. Primarily however, my reading slowed because my ability to do increased. In the business of resettling and rebuilding, there is peace in the slow progression of words on a page, of ideas filtering through the interstices of thought.
2022 was also a year that I managed to do more sewing, and more in the studio than I had in the entire time since George died in 2013, more than since I left Hyde Park at the end of 2011. This despite flirtations with heart failure and four cardiac procedures. This despite long weeks where I felt very much like I was living at the bottom the ocean. Small though my accomplishments were, they were very much a good thing.
The photos in this blog post are mostly gathered from various posts on my sewing blog, which is once again being retired. I will never be the world's greatest seamstress, embroiderer, weaver, any of that. I don't care and it doesn't matter. Nor do I always want to maintain a blog devoted to a single subject. You will simply have to put up with me. The original decision to retire sewdistracted was sound, its resurrection arose from my own feelings of division and loss, feelings that are best returned to the past.
Here also is an accounting of sorts.
- I did a lot of alterations. I needed things to wear and I was stubbornly resistant to going out and buying things simply because I could. Some things were bought, it is true, but many things were taken in and a few were completely reconfigured. I only posted two of the many items I altered, (a linen tank/tunic that surprisingly is still in my closet, and a pair of slacks).
- There was a steady stream of church related sewing, both in terms of mending and making new items.
- A friend and I made a plastic-wrap sloper/muslin and I worked with that somewhat, although not enough, both modifying knitting patterns and working on sewing muslins.
- I sewed three simple summer dresses.
- I fitted five muslins for future dresses, all basic styles that I will be made and worn, perhaps in multiple iterations. This was done during a fabulous seminar at PaperMaple Studio in New Orleans, another experience that did wonders for my state of mind and improved skills.
- I organized my pattern stash.
- I organized three corners of my studio. There is more organizing and sorting to be done. Yarn remains only partially unpacked and there is an entire closet to design and put to use.
- I went to the boro stitch workshop at Arrowmont.
- I went on a sewing retreat with friends and I thread traced a dress.
- I finished said dress only to decide I didn't like it. I proceeded to take it apart, and redesign it in a way that I think works better. I have not yet completely put it back together.
- I made gifts, mostly quilted, mostly small projects, but not all.
- I started to refresh my embroidery and hand-sewing skills. At first I despaired that my fingers would ever work again, but eventually my fingers began to cooperate, stitches became more even, the feel of a needle and thread became calming rather than stressful.
All in all I sewed 39.6 yards of fabric in 2022. It is not much, and yet it is more than I have sewn in many years. For the most part I was happy with the projects I completed. I sewed more fabric than I bought, also for the first time in years.
