I’ve had the sewing machine out for the first time in a while this week. For months I’d been hankering to make a dress, for no discernible reason. The pattern is in a Japanese book I’ve had for years without going further than thinking that one day I might like to make that, and there is no definition of “need” that would include my possession of a new dress. Even so, one of my vague projects for this year – career break, turning 50 – is occasionally to do things because I feel like it. The career break is of course a rare luxury, but on whatever scale it’s possible to follow the odd harmless whim, I recommend it.
I learned to use a sewing machine as a child. My mother made most of our clothes, and passed on her skills. As a teenager, with the brazen confidence of someone who doesn’t know what’s supposed to be difficult, I embarked on whatever stood between me and the item of clothing I had in mind. I cut and sewed dresses on the bias, became confident with the strange geometry of the crotch seams of trousers and the counterintuitive curves of sleeve-heads. I added pockets and linings when I wanted them, learned the hard way which fabrics suited which designs.
There is no need, now, for me to make my own clothes. For years it was a choice between buying poor quality and making good quality; we can all afford badly made fast fashion but I had learned to respect natural fibres and French double seams. These days I can buy durable, well-made clothes, but I still knit my own jumpers and apparently, this week, sew my own dresses.
I know a couple of my friends think it’s a waste of time, all this handicraft. There’s an obvious feminist argument against a writer spending her time cooking and sewing. Still, it pleases me.
There’s a feminist argument against a writer spending time cooking and sewing, but it pleases me
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Making things yourself only sometimes, unpredictably, gives you better than you can buy. (Home-made pitta bread is revelatory. See also hummus, crackers and rice pudding.) But the professionals are often better at it, and it’s certainly cheaper to buy even the poshest jam than devote an afternoon to fruit-picking and an evening, a lot of sugar and a lot of electricity to making your own, which may or may not turn out well. Price my time at minimum wage, add materials, and the dress-in-progress has already cost more than buying a ready-to-wear equivalent. You could plausibly argue that by doing these things myself, I’m depriving the sustainable small businesses from which I would otherwise buy.
But that’s not it. Making things isn’t about penny-pinching. And I don’t think cooking or sewing, or for the matter of that carpentry or wood-turning, are intrinsically moral acts. Maybe it’s a declaration of independence, and certainly there’s temptation to keep going down the production process; my mother now grows the plants to dye the yarn she spins to weave scarves and towels. I have a friend who progressed from making bread to feeding sourdough to grinding flour, and he daydreams of growing the grain.
Some of my own cooking experiments have seemed absurd even to me; I’m sure efficiency comes with practice but the time it took me to make enough tortellini for a dinner party, including making the pasta dough and rolling it by hand, was wildly out of proportion to the time it took my friends to eat it. Never again. I feel similarly about sewing my own underwear and maybe knitting my own socks, though I know people who do both.
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If the pleasure of this kind of make-do-and-mend is not about saving money, the planet or achieving independence from consumerism, what is it? Something about knowing how things work, how the objects we handle and need and love are made; something about being able to make things well, or at least making them badly often enough to learn respect for good makers.
There are places for machines, technology, software. I don’t want to ride in an artisanal handmade helicopter and if I were to need a ventilator or pacemaker, I’d want the latest tech. Dishwashers, vacuum cleaners and washing machines are obvious godsends to those of us who have lived without them. But I have a deep sense that it’s good to know with your hands and your body where things come from and how they are made.
