sewing garments

discernment + lots of beads and rhinestones

I’ve been sewing garments: big ruffled things, beaded metallic things, stretchy things that pull taut over shoulders and hips, see-through things. I sew them and then I put them in an IKEA bag under my chair. They don’t fit me, they’re not for me, but I do nothing with them. I have an Instagram dedicated to them that I do not post on. I have friends who would probably like them. I sew them and I put them away, then I open my cabinet of little jewel-colored bolts and think: what can I do with what I have? This discernment, this puzzling, is the best part.

I have resigned myself to an online presence for music, because I want it in the hands of many others. I’m fine to take my photos and write my captions, because I desire to share. The garments, however, feel like a secret I get to keep. Or, not a secret - here I am telling you about them now! But they feel like a process I do alone. Did you know Jo is a painter? Did you know she does VFX? Jots down essays on her phone that could be on the front page of any young-professional-arts-and-culture website? She doesn’t say much publicly, and she likely won’t bring these things up unprompted.

I’m working on Christmas gifts as the year dips into winter. I like doing these things slowly, something I don’t often afford myself in my daily life. Most things need to be done quickly, focused, with precision, well. Sewing is about the process as much as it is about the final item. Songwriting feels similar, but songwriting is like 20% of being a musician. The rest is recording, touring, selling merch, doing social media, etc. Maybe I’m just in search of that feeling, the moment where a project lies out in front of me and I get to put the pieces together on my own time. We’re beginning to think about the next Ophelias album, and I’m relishing that same feeling: art on the horizon, something to be made.

The process of beading and embroidery reminds me of monks. My uncle is a zen priest and has done the ritual of sewing his robes by hand. Every stitch has to be exactly the same length. It took him months to sew all those identical stitches. I like beading and embroidery because it takes time. I put on a movie or a podcast or an album and focus on what’s in front of me, dealing with the tiny pearlescent nuisances that clatter everywhere unless I treat them with the care they demand. I balance them, fit them on my tiny needle, to place them correctly.

I started embroidering in high school, and my senior year I would sit in the back of my government class stitching. I made little pieces on felt: a tracing of a hand with swirling colors inside, a photo-accurate the Mountain Goats album cover, patches of static-y TVs and eyeballs for my jacket. I started embroidering shirts in college, selling them to friends for wildly low amounts compared to the time it took to stitch a botanical drawing of a peach or a dragonfly. I made Sleater Kinney underwear for a friend for her birthday (“modern girl,” naturally). If you unzipped one of the pockets of my backpack, you would find a tangle of brightly-colored embroidery floss. After college I learned to sew through a combination of talking with my mom, watching YouTube videos, and experimenting without patterns. I made a resolution to use only secondhand fabric after a friend spent years telling me how much fabric waste there is in the world. I like the act of seeking, and of knowing that what I find secondhand might not be exactly what I was imagining. Sewing meant I could not only make the adornment on a garment, but I could make the garment itself. As I have gotten older and sewed more, the garments have grown into intricate, fiddly things. Corsetry and making fabric out of squares of discarded lace. Pintucking and pleating. There’s more to say about the femininity of this craft, the disregard for “women’s work,” my attraction towards discarded lace and the repeated act of measuring a tiny, exact pleat over and over. Beyond garments, I embroidered the cover for Crocus (our record), as well as the back cover and all the little images, one for each song, on the insert. A lamb and a match and a mirror and a super blood moon…

I’ve been starting to think about putting together a website, taking photos of my friends in the garments in the bag under my chair, putting them online, selling them. I can feel myself procrastinating, waiting for the exact right moment (which, of course, doesn’t come). Perhaps I’m hesitant to give up this process as it is now, where I make what I want and there’s no pressure to do all the rest of what creative projects now tend to mean, the ever-present monetization of hobbies, blah blah, I’m sure you know.

But perhaps I’m also nervous that because these items are a product of a private process, something that feels at least a little sacred since I do it alone, with no training, with just my grandmother’s and my mother’s knowledge passed down via Halloween costumes and telepathy, if my garments are not up to some kind of standard, they cease to exist as garments and then only exist as art pieces - cool to look at but unwearable. I want to make things that people wear in their lives, that live with them, that go onstage and to clubs and to work and to the library and the union meeting and the afterparty. I want to give life to secondhand materials, to piece together things that have their own histories and pass it to someone else to add their own. Maybe I’m just bashful that I can’t sew a pair of pants yet.

Soon there will be a website with garments on it. I’ll ask a friend to take photos of my other friends and dress them up in things with volume and beads and strange shapes. I’ll tell you all about it.

my sewing spot