Being able to sew is radical, liberating and canny, which is why I’ve taught my six-year-old to fix his own socks.
This may sound like the overzealous justification of someone who as a schoolgirl took more interest in making her own trousers than in how to create a spreadsheet, but I truly believe that the skill of sewing opens the door to a lifetime of self-sufficiency, creativity and thrift. Being able to sew my own clothes means I haven’t had to go into a high street clothes shop for well over a year; I haven’t had to stare at my naked, quaking flesh in a changing room mirror; I haven’t contributed to the sweated labour of the global south or the environmental devastation wreaked by the fashion industry.
Away from my own outfits, being handy with a needle and thread meant I could repair the hammock I was sleeping in when it got torn on a bramble, and make my son a tiny pair of waterproof trousers out of an old raincoat when he first learned to crawl. I’ve made curtains for famous authors, fixed tent zips during storms and recently made an outfit for a friend who needed something to wear to a film premiere. I haven’t yet administered stitches to someone in need, but I’m not discounting the possibility.
There is an argument – introduced to me by my mum, in fact – that the invention that changed history wasn’t the wheel but the needle. With the ability to string together animal skins, we could go through the world, protected from the elements, with our arms and legs free to move. We separated ourselves from monkeys. We got clobber. According to an article I just skipped through from the Journal of Archaeological Science, “sharpened bone implements that were used as awls for piercing soft material” have been found in the Blombos Cave in South Africa, dated to somewhere between 71,000 and 76,000 years ago. I love the idea that I could travel 76,000 years through time and actually recognise the work. Hell, give me a couple of weeks without shaving and I could join in, unnoticed.
Sewing has quite a nicey-nicey reputation in this country – it’s all Hobbycraft, pastel curtains, craft fairs and Kirstie Allsopp. But I’m interested in it as an anti-consumerist tool. With a rush of something almost like thirst, I can remember the suffragette banners that hung beside me when I worked at The Women’s Library in Whitechapel, east London, and the banners I’ve sewn for myself, carried at marches and protests about everything from saving the NHS, to Black Lives Matter, to the Women’s March, to calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Every Tuesday, I spend three hours in a community project in the shadow of my local hospital, making shopping bags for the local food bank with some older women. They are all in some way medical: a doctor, a physiotherapist, a former midwife. As we sit around, drinking tea and stitching up seams, my eyes water at their easy conversation about placental obstruction, haemorrhages and night shifts. If it weren’t for a shared ability to push a small piece of metal and length of thread through fabric, I would almost certainly never have met these women.
Making my own clothes means I don’t have to ever know my dress size, so am a little more resistant to diet culture and body shaming. Being able to repair things also alleviates (slightly) my screaming horror over waste, landfill and the frittering away of natural resources. I’ve read two books this month: Wasteland by Oliver Franklin-Wallis, in which he tracks the frightening reality of throwaway culture, and Tom Lake by Ann Patchett, in which the narrator breaks out of an unhappy acting career thanks to being able to make and fix clothes. Both shored up my faith in making my own.
Which is why, yesterday, while my son watched The Little Mermaid, I sewed a quilted waistcoat made from £3 of fabric from a scrap project, an old bedsheet and some thin foam I found under our bed that absolutely nobody in the house recognised. My son watched, absent-mindedly, taking in that this is how clothes are made. Within three hours, I was wearing something that had pockets, will keep my kidneys warm and, judging by the website, would cost about £126 from Toast.
Just don’t look too closely at some of my stitches.
Nell Frizzell is the author of Holding the Baby: Milk, Sweat and Tears from the Frontline of Motherhood
