Resting hands
Some have you been (very kindly) asking why there hasn’t been a post here for a while. The answer is that for the first time in five years, I have just had almost a month away from my business. I have had shorter breaks of course, but this was the first time for a while that I completely stopped. July 2022 marked the tenth anniversary of Beautiful Stitches and for various reasons a trip to the UK became possible. I was a very long way from home and travelling on my own, so it was literally impossible for me do anything other than answer emails, and even then I was lacking access to most of my usual technology. It took two weeks for me to really relax into the realisation that this was total time out for me, and another week and a half for me to just revel in it. Even though the orders and requests were piling up in my absence, I was able to just let it all go and enjoy some free space in my life.
Depending on your point of view, I was either lucky or unlucky to go down with COVID-19 just two days after landing at Heathrow. I’m a relentless optimist, so I’m going with lucky :) My planned week of being a tourist in London transformed into five days of enforced rest in a pretty basement flat in Earls Court. Initially I was just too unwell to care but by day three, the fever finally broke and I started to function again.
Before the virus made its presence known, I found a knitting shop nearby. Serendipitously called Beautiful Knitters, it was filled with the most gorgeous array of yarns in different weights and colours. I had deliberately not brought knitting supplies with me so that I could have all the fun of choosing a simple project to work on whilst I was travelling. The shop owner and I fell into conversation, delighting in the similarity of our business names and the ethos we both held of simply sharing our passion for our respective crafts. I like my knitting to be simple and she suggested that I work a pattern called “Hitchhiker”. I chose a beautifully variegated skein of wool, a set of bamboo needles, and then purchased the pattern online (you can find it here if you are interested).
So, my first convalescent activity was to wind the skein of wool into a ball. Fortunately this required no thought at all and I had all the fun of seeing in detail the changing colours of my chosen skein. And my second activity was simply to start knitting. The entire “Hitchhiker” pattern is worked in garter stitch (the most basic stitch possible for those of you unfamiliar with knitting jargon), with some regular increasing and casting off. It’s an ideal rhythmic hand project that requires very little thinking and has the added benefit that it grows quite quickly in the beginning. Given that I was feeling a little sorry for myself, it was the perfect balm for my soul as I lost myself in listening to an audiobook and bingeing Netflix.
The gorgeous colours that evolved in my Hitchhiker scarf.
By the following day, I was feeling much better, but I was still confined to barracks. So now I took out my stitching. I had brought materials with me to make small, embroidered coasters as gifts for friends whom I would be staying with along the way. Working small squares is one of my favourite stitching projects. It’s where my design journey started and I love returning to the simple pleasure of laying down a square border and then filling it with colour and pattern. The plastic coaster mounts I was using had the added benefit of providing an instant “finish”. There was no mucking about with framing or construction. I simply trimmed the fabric back to the edge of the completed embroidery, popped it into the frame, and snapped in the back. Et voila!
For the next few weeks I alternated between my knitting and my stitching. Knitting was ideal on the train journeys that took me from London to South Wales, then Bath, Reading, north Wales, Shrewsbury, and back to London. My stitching was my companion in the evenings. After long days of walking and sightseeing, I enjoyed working my squares in the twilit summer evenings. I completed four, motivated by my desire to give them away almost immediately.
A completed coaster photographed against the courtyard wall of my Earl’s Court basement flat.
On the very last weekend I stayed with a friend whom I haven’t seen for decades. I settled into easy conversation with him and his wife almost immediately. As I described my creative business, I had the weird sensation of seeing it from the outside. A seasoned businessman himself, my friend was asking who I had to help me with various aspects of my business - shooting and editing videos, dyeing threads, preparing kits, etc. Each time he asked me, I would laughingly respond, “No - I do that myself too.” His response was blunt - “No wonder you needed a break!”.
And he was right. I did need time out, to reflect and reassess. Not because I will necessarily change much of what I do, but because I love what I do so much that I want to make sure that I can keep doing it for at least another ten years. It needs to be sustainable.
The core reason for my trip had been to attend The Do Lectures in Wales. This event brings together people who want to make some kind of change in the world. For me, as you know, it’s the ideas expressed here in this blog about the importance of working with our hands. The Do Lectures take place on a farm in Wales, so already the event was quite unlike anything else I had ever attended. There were speakers and workshops and lots of time to talk to fellow delegates about literally anything. The magic of the experience was the sheer diversity of conversations I had with so many different people. As it happens, they mostly weren’t about The Hands Manifesto, but about broader questions around the meaning and purpose of life. However, the very last speaker of the entire event really hit home for me.
Our accommodation in Wales for The DO Lectures - not your typical convention setting!
Her name was Lucy Gannon. She is a British playwright who has written and produced for theatre and television. She wrote her first play in her late 30s as a submission for the Richard Burton Award for New Playwrights. She had faced some pretty tough life challenges and winning the competition (which she did) would prove to be a life changing experience. But tellingly, she said during her talk that when she sat down to write, the competition and all it potentially implied became irrelevant. “When I was writing I knew that I was doing what I was supposed to do.” Listening to these words, in a barn on a farm far away from home, my eyes filled with tears. Because that’s exactly how I feel about my stitching. As my business has become busier and busier over recent years, I haven’t had as much time as I would like to stitch. I love what I do, and sharing my passion with my customers is a true privilege, but if I start to neglect my own creative practice then the bottom falls out of the whole venture.
So, my hands and I have been resting, in the best possible way for me - by returning to the simple pleasure of stitching (and knitting) with no expectations. It seems like a possible contradiction that resting comes through doing, but for me there was such comfort in letting my hands do what they love best, to no set timetable, just for a while.
When I came home, I revisited a book I bought last year, “The Art of Rest” by Claudia Hammond. She talks about a range of well known methods for rest like mindfulness, walking, listening to music, being alone, spending time in nature, a hot bath, etc. She also highlights the ways that we can find small moments of rest and respite in a busy world, and that rest is different for everyone. Her suggestion is to have your own unique “box of rest”. I suspect that for many of you, like me, making something with your hands will be in that box.
I’m so grateful that this past month gave me a chance to rest more deeply than I have in a long time. Lucy’s words and a few weeks of blissful time out reminded me that this entire creative journey, including The Hands Manifesto, evolved from my love of embroidery. There might sometimes be an unplanned longer break between posts here, because running a creative business singlehandedly can sometimes run a little out of control! Or perhaps I’m just spending some time with my stitching so that I can refill my energy tanks to keep doing everything else :)
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