To Sew a Home: a new era

House/Work

The day after Halloween, I moved into my own apartment. Over a week later I'm still having a hard time believing it. In the 6 years since I graduated college I've moved a grand total of...15 times! As a person who loves to nest, this here-and-there has been challenging, to say the least. I could go on and on about this feeling, but if you know, you know...you know? In the winter of 2018 I envisioned an art project that I hoped would help me less homesick, more settled - a residency I called To Sew a Home.

maya standing inside the fabric house. the walls are made of white fabric that has been pieced together. maya stands with her back to the camera wearing all white. she lifts her hand to pick a loose thread off the fabric wall. photo by Becca Haydu.

In February 2018 I placed my trusty Singer on a pedestal in my alma mater's art gallery and over the course of a week I sewed a fabric house out of antique and vintage textiles. The result: a ghost of the idea of home. The walls didn't even touch the ground, but hovered, the whole thing suspended with fishing line from the ceiling. I made the piece in an effort to construct something of my own during a time when I felt very helpless and lost. I just wanted a home. I wanted to never move again. When the residency was over I took the house down and folded it inside a brocade tablecloth, which is where it has resided ever since.

the white walls of the fabric house float above the light brown wooden floors. photo by Becca Haydu.

A month after To Sew a Home I wrote a reflection piece, a sort of instructional meditation on what the process felt like and I typed it up on my typewriter and pinned it to the wall of my studio. I’ll share that later in a separate post :) I'm writing about this now because the homesickness I've felt for most of my adult life has often threatened to swallow me, and I always felt at the mercy of it's tides. Moving into my own apartment is my resistance to this feeling of helplessness. I'm not sewing or even building a home, I'm working three jobs to rent one and make it my own, and it feels monumental. Last night I confronted a sink full of dishes and no sponge by crocheting my own little wonky, checkered one while listening to music. I washed the dishes an hour later when it was finished, happily noticing that the green checks complimented the pink-handled silverware I found at the thrift store the day before. I'm hoping to write more about these moments and the objects I create for my home here on my blog.

atop a yellow velvet cushion, a white hand rests beside a crocheted, checkered dishcloth. a bit of knitting can be seen on the right hand corner of the image, which is made of variegated green yarn.

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Knit Magic: unraveling the orange sweater

The words 'ravel' and 'unravel' create a spiral of meaning: ravel, meaning both to entangle and disentangle; unravel, to disentangle, to come apart. They follow each other in their twin meanings, twined around each other like two strands of yarn plied together to make one stronger yarn, fit for knitting a sweater.

These meditations on knit magic are central to my work, to the processes of making and mending, of taking things apart to see what they are made of and putting them together in new ways. The act of unraveling a sweater can be both spiritual and practical, and in reality these seemingly separate labels inform each other. When I unravel a thrifted sweater in order to glean it's yarn, I don't know it's history so I can merely guess, imagining the life that led it here to my hands. When I unravel a sweater I have knit myself, I'm not only salvaging the yarn to use again, I'm meditating on the life I have lived with the sweater, and imagining the life I will live with the new garment I knit with it's yarn. Unraveling is a way to exist in a liminal space - the cloth becomes unrecognizable when it's turned into its base material - a strand of yarn - before it is turned into cloth again. This space can be uncomfortable, but it is also a time for dreaming to take place. 

I often refer to this work as 'unraveling a torment', taken from a quote by the late Louise Bourgeois, a French artist who spent much of her life taking apart her clothing and sewing it back together in new forms. She wrote "To unravel a torment you must begin somewhere". To unravel a sweater, I look for the woven-in ends where the knitter cast off and begin there.

I knit the orange sweater in a season of heartbreak. I knit it from the yarn of a homemade sweater that I unraveled. The color is like sunlight on pine boards in June. It is dappled with sky-blue spots and white and black flecks like salt and pepper. I found the sweater at the thrift store, knew right away that it had been knit by hand, hands that may even have chosen the yarn at the local yarn shop. I can’t imagine giving a homemade sweater to Goodwill, though I'm grateful when I find one that I can use. The sweater was a gift, I decided, and maybe when a fissure grew in the relationship the sweater was moved on. Or maybe I’m completely wrong. There is no way of knowing, but as I unravel the sweater, my mind is meditating on my own heartbreak.

*

I unravel the sweater and it comes apart easily, without issue. I wash the skeins in the enamel basin and hang them on the laundry line to dry in the sunlight. The yarn is warm and irresistible to me. I plan on knitting a crewneck sweater.

It's the finest yarn I’ve ever knit a sweater out of. The work is slow and I am miserable. Not because of the knitting, no, I am happily distracted by the knitting. I cry a lot while holding the growing sweater in my arms. The pattern calls for simple stockinette stitch in sport weight yarn, orange like summer sun setting over blue mountains.

We move house. I live alone, fearing that I’ve driven everyone away. The days are long and hot so I stop knitting the sweater and leave it in my project bag, which gets discovered by mice who chew the soft yarn for bedding. Angrily I rip back the arm beyond the holes and start knitting again. I discover another hole on the belly of the sweater. The mice have offered a moment of pause and I consider what I really want from this yarn.

*

I unravel the sweater on a beautiful day in late August. I’m wearing a greenish yellow tank top and I sit cross legged on my bed with the sun pouring in. I take a video of the process using my phone, which is propped up against a basket resting on the bed. I pull the needles out of the arm and begin winding that yarn back into a ball, unpicking the tubular binding at the neck and hem. It is tedious, but when I am done, the entire sweater is a heavy ball the size of a child's head. I walk around with it clutched against my stomach. I think of turning it into another sweater, one with a v-neck and loose hem, something that will fall off the shoulder. I decide against deciding and put the ball, heavy and orange as the sun, away for the winter. I will return to it when a sweater calls out again to be created.

Caring for Clothes: denim

holy denim,

that unyielding textile

the bravest knees kneel in mud and earth

planting seedlings

new life and sustenance

I plant stitches into the knees of my jeans

beloved even before they came to me

and now

a garden of thread and patches

bloom where I use them most.

As summer approaches, I feel the call of denim. In truth I wear this hardworking fabric all year long, but in the heat of summer there is great beauty in the simplicity of a uniform, and I find myself wearing jeans and a t-shirt, bare feet in grass, sunglasses on. If I have to wear shoes I choose clogs. For years I have chosen this outfit because it makes me feel ready for anything, and in the summer, that's how I want to feel every day.

Denim is such a special fabric. Traditionally made with cotton and woven in a twill pattern, it’s a hardworking cloth, strong and malleable, changing to fit the wearer, fading according to the work that is done in them. Jeans are now often made with a small percentage of elastane (Spandex), which allows them to give a little and be more flexible. Good denim can last for decades if it’s taken care of, but when it comes down to it, cotton can only hold up for so long and there always comes a point when the fabric has transformed into something almost brittle, so delicate that new holes appear with each wear. This is a bittersweet period, where donning the denim becomes almost sacred because there are only a handful of wears left in the garment. Each outing is appreciated, and each stitch is a spell. When I sit to repair denim at this phase, my efforts are a swan song, a final gesture of care for a garment that has served me well.

Below, I've written out some of my advice for caring for your denim to give it a long life.

Take care and take heart.

Freezing:

First off, denim rarely looks dirty - this is one of the magical things about it! Before you even think of washing your jeans, try putting them in the freezer overnight. It sounds silly but trust me, it will freshen them up and kill any odor-causing bacteria and you'll be set to wear them a few more times. Folks who at first laughed about this now swear by it :) A fun story about this is that this winter, I put my jeans in my parent's chest freezer while I was staying with them and when I took them out they smelled like blueberries!

Washing:

When washing jeans, turn them inside out and close the zipper and/or buttons. Always wash on cold, as heat will degrade the fabric faster. Use a gentle detergent.

Drying:

Hang dry whenever possible. If that is not an option for you or you're in a rush, use the lowest setting on the dryer. Like with washing, heat breaks down the fibers faster, and in the case of jeans with Spandex or elastane, these stretchy fibers lose their stretch.

Mending:

Find a local tailor who doesn't mind replacing zippers or learn how to do this yourself! With patience and a seam ripper you can work wonders. Patch thinning fabric before it becomes a hole. Save worn out jeans or pairs that don't fit anymore for patching materials.

Meditations on Decay: black cashmere sweater

I do my best to mend these worn spots -

I cannot halt the course of decay forever,

yet I continue to stitch,

careful and meticulous.

I weave and remake, bent over in low light

to infuse you with this red wool.

Like blood, it gives you new life.

The sweater came to me in the summer of 2015 while I was living and working in Boston. It was the summer before my senior year in college. The city was hot and crowded but I was lonely. I was working at the Museum of Fine Arts for the summer and I had a self-imposed uniform of black clothing. For me, this uniform allowed for less decision fatigue in the mornings before work and it was professional while also employing lots of comfy jersey fabric. I could also get away with wearing a lot of the same clothes day after day without attracting much notice. After work I made a habit of taking the train to Davis Square to visit Buffalo Exchange and Goodwill in order to round out my wardrobe. One evening, as I was running my hand absentmindedly along the long racks of clothes the sweater leapt out at me. It was cashmere, such a soft and luxurious fabric - one that I had never owned before - and it was black, which meant it would go with almost everything in my closet.

I wore the sweater almost everyday that summer and into my senior year. It kept me warm in the frigid, air-conditioned basement office of the museum, and in the years since I can’t think of a life event or activity I haven’t worn it to; it has covered me at weddings, funerals, parties, concerts, hikes, picnics, and more. It has held me in moments of joy and despair, and all of the mundane moments in between. It must be in the running to be my most-worn garment. I’ve since collected several more cashmere sweaters and I wear them all year long; my favorite way to wear them is as a base layer right against my skin in the liminal seasons, layering warmer, coarser sweaters on top when the days grow colder.

Because of its heavy rotation, the sweater became the first garment in my wardrobe to require regular maintenance. Over the years, it has gotten snagged on branches and fences, and the fabric has worn thin in many places. I cut my teeth as a mender on the elbows of the sweater, learning lessons each time I sat down to darn it. I chose red thread to work with - a symbol of life and vitality. For 5 years I used solely shades of red to darn it, and as I approached this new year, I decided I wanted to track the years of wear and repair using different colors. Last night as I sat down to tend to the new holes and worn spots of the last year, I switched to pink thread, and I’ll think I’ll stay with that color for the next 5 years. I love the idea of the sweater slowly becoming a landscape painted with thread, abstract shapes blooming from the elbows and cuffs. Patterns of wear. Evidence of care. As always, the stitches feel like a form of magic, extending the life of a garment that is so like a second skin to me that I feel like I’m tending to my own wounds.