Rachel Nelson, 2016
In my earliest memories, I am laying under my mother’s loom while she threaded it. Threading a loom is a long and tedious process- the crafting equivalent of watching paint dry. I loved it. It was deeply soothing to lay there, watching the sky slowly fill with threads snaking back and forth, orchestrated by my mother’s busy fingers. Tiny threads making something that would eventually bear weight.
In a patriarchal society that marginalizes the ability of femininity to be a quality of strength, consciously choosing femme presentation and femme-marked activity often feels like a radical pushback. Every time we get dressed, femme-presenting people are launching a miniature wearable revolution. When we refuse to let traditionally feminine-marked domestic labor or femme-presentation continue to be seen as weak, silly, or meaningless, but rather, an act that muddies and troubles the gender binary, something interesting happens. The ways we adorn our bodies and our lives becomes more than decoration, but an invitation to see the world as playful and passionate.
Crafting, sewing, and weaving is a way of reimagining and expanding the limits of what our representation of self could look like. In creating our own visual culture of representation, we are given the chance to map our own terrain. There’s an odd intersection in the crafting world between women who have been crafting for generations, and gender queer and femme people who are finding it for the first time as a way to take control over how their body is decorated.
Recently, I asked my I asked my mother about the value of fiber arts, and she summed it up like this:
Traditional women's work has been considered less valuable than those art or craft forms generally attributed to men, because women have devoted their attention to things that are used, they are objects that are used up. Clothing gets worn and worn out, rugs get walked on and threadbare, food gets created and then consumed. Because of its transient nature, the work of women has traditionally carried less weight.
There’s something radical about refocusing attention on the things we make for the body. . Napkins, rugs, clothes, etc- these are the fabrics that bear the weight of our day to day living. A relocation of value emerges when we do this- something that feels deeply anticapitalist, that pushes us toward community rather than competition, toward conversation rather than opposition.
I didn’t always feel this way about fiber arts. As a teen, I resisted learning any of the skills my mom offered to teach me. I had fully bought the narrative that modern women had outgrown domesticity, that our place was in the workforce- making money and creating policy change. Crafting, I remember thinking, is what women did before they realized they didn’t have to stay home. Real art was pretentious, obscure, and somehow worthy of my time and attention in a way that a rug or a piece of clothing never could be.
So I did feminism how I thought I was supposed to. I went to protests. I got passionate about Ani DiFranco. There were moments when I would think of the work of my mother- (sewing a patch back on a jean jacket in an outhouse at a concert, cutting t-shirts into sloppy crop tops) but I never bothered to contextualize it within my growing feminist awareness as work that mattered. But even without thinking of sewing or weaving as radical, I started to learn these skills, for the simple fact that they were useful. The fiber arts are the art of keeping things together, often through radical transformation of the form of the material; a tangle of separate tiny threads could become a solid fabric that held weight. There was a subtle magic there, I realized. As I grew up, the skill of how not to fall apart suddenly started to feel deeply valuable.
There’s something about the process of moving through early adulthood that humbles you. You move- across the country, through homes, through people. You learn to be alone, or you spend years avoiding loneliness. You get your heart broken; by injustice, by lovers that leave, by friends that forget you, by the sheer weight of waking up every day in the world that moves from the certainties of childhood into the gradient greys of adulthood. You start to learn what the hard work of empathy looks like. Somewhere in all this, I found myself face to face with the work of my mother.
I’ve realized that as far as I thought I ran from the things my mother tried to teach me, I never got that far. I told her I didn’t need to know how to sew, and then ten years later found myself googling “how to do a french seam” on my phone so I could sew a drag queen into a dress so tight she could barely breathe. I spent my childhood rolling my eyes at cross stitching and knitting, only to find myself spending a weekend hunched over an embroidery hoop making a gift for the anniversary of my girlfriend’s fight with cancer. And when my trans partner of nine years had top surgery, I sat in the hospital waiting room, full of anxiety, braiding and unbraiding the fringe on my jacket with fingers that longed to feel useful. Craft became a meditative way of sitting with difficulty, a way of making use of the energy of pain and anxiety.
The radical queer community, it turns out, needs people who know how to hold things together.
My mother describes this complicated feeling by saying that the act of making, and the habits of use, coupled with the respect given to the ultimate outcomes of that making, defines the parameters of feminism for me. Often, people come to crafting seeking functionality through difficulty; as a way of taking control of some tangible corner of their world.
At twenty three, my mother found weaving as a response to being poor, young, and pregnant. When I asked her how it felt to discover weaving, she told me suddenly, I was pregnant, married, and milking goats instead of singing in clubs. I was away from my family for the first time. At a time when I was recreating and remaking myself, I found myself smack in the middle of a host of creative women that helped me with that redefinition. The physical act of making, especially making together in an empowered feminist community, translates on deep revolutionary levels: every time we make something new we are validating the process of transformation, of difference, of possibility. Look, we are saying to ourselves, we are more than enough. We are capable of so much.
There is a sense of history, of legacy in making with our hands that is deeply important in so many marginalized communities, groups that grapple daily with invisible and erased histories. For my mother, her history lies in what her hands have been taught. I knit, and I am not only creating what I will wear next winter, but I am sitting with my mother, my grandmother, my friends. Their physical bodies are lost, but my hands, my stitches, and the garments that I put on my body remind me of them every single day. I continue to collectively create with them every time I make something.
For me and my community, the act of making tends toward imaginative remarking of the realities we find ourselves existing in. For example, drag shows that highlight trash- a pushback on beauty norms, on gender norms, on thinking we need money to make things beautiful. We come together to create and make in a society that constantly tells us we aren’t good enough, and there is a collective power in that rebellion. This work encompasses the pragmatic business of being alive and at the same time, negotiating the creation of something that is collective, cooperative, and ephemeral.
As Arundati Roy writes “another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” Sometimes, I know another world is coming. Sitting deep in thought on quiet nights, I can hear her in the next room, weaving. Getting ready. Filling the sky with new threads. Holding together what wants to fall apart.
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