If you had said to me three years ago – maybe even two – that I’d come to love hand stitching, I would have called you crazy.
I’d never particularly enjoyed hand stitching up to that point. It’s slow, and my skill was not great, making for an even slower process and uneven and messy results to boot. It was just something I didn’t want to devote my time to when I thought that time could be better spent elsewhere. The final stitching together of things was a means to an end.
Much like hand stitching, that perception changed slowly. It began with me not really liking the look of machine quilted things. My first quilt, which was a shibori* quilting project from The Modern Natural Dyer by Kristine Vejar was where I tried quilting for the first time in 2020.
The project did have instructions to dye cotton thread for hand quilting, but at the time I thought that was secondary. The prime reason I wanted to make this was to practice not only my cellulose dyeing, but also shibori techniques (my appreciation of which has only grown over time). So after I had pieced and made the quilt sandwich, I used my machine to quilt, which you can see in the photo above. I did that for a few smaller pieces, and another quilt as well. But after those I felt I was missing out on something. There was a hand made quality that the machine quilting seemed to cancel out. I had worked hard to create this piece that could not possibly look like a machine made it, and then I drew on it with a machine. I thought I had wanted straight, perfectly even stitches that a machine could give me. Turns out, that’s not what I wanted.
So I steeled myself and decided to try hand quilting.
The real inspiration for this was following a bunch of quilters on instagram that very specifically stuck to hand quilting, using a mixture of big stitch quilting and more traditional teeny tiny hand quilting methods. I was drawn to big (or bigger than those insanely small 9 stitches per inch quilters, anyway) stitch quilting, so I acquired some sashiko thread and began hand quilting.
My first few practice pieces, which were small, were terrible. The stitches were all over the place, they were different sizes, I couldn’t do a straight line to do my life. I almost packed it in, but the allure of these beautiful hand stitched quilts I was seeing kept me practicing. Eventually I did feel comfortable enough to do a whole quilt hand stitched. It was a slightly-smaller than queen size quilt, that also happened to be my first 100% naturally dyed quilt.
This quilt is far from perfect. The pink colour is not what I wanted at all; I was still relatively new to cellulose dyeing, and I had planned a deep madder red, but messed up somewhere in the process and got this. I’ve come to appreciate the colour now, and recreated it earlier this year for another project. The stitching is even farther from perfect. From the front you can’t tell quite so much, but from the back (which is all indigo dyed) the white stitches stand out and you can see where I jogged over where I didn’t mean to, and the difference in stitch lengths.
But I don’t care. I absolutely love this quilt, and it sits in the den where it gets regular use. I’m so immensely proud of this thing, and it’s a testament to perseverance and experimentation. I’ve come to appreciate it as a journal of where I was at the time with learning new skills.
Don’t let the gushing above fool you. I don’t love all hand stitching and want to do it all the time for everything. My trusty machine is my go-to for piecing quilt tops, and when it comes to garments, I think I can safely say I’ll never be hand sewing those. But I do find myself looking more and more at projects that will highlight, or allow me to hand stitch elements.
I’ve hand stitched a lot more since the completion of my Bear Paw Quilt, my stitches are straighter and I’m better at making them more even. They’ll never be absolutely perfect. I know some quilters work hard and pride themselves on their perfect stitches and perfect lengths, but that will never be me.
If I wanted that after all, I could just use my machine.
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*Some people feel more comfortable using the term resist dyed in place of shibori. While shibori is resist dyeing method, the techniques I used (very inexpertly) are shibori methods. I feel it’s only appropriate to use the correct cultural terms, instead of attempting to erase them by using a more generic term.