WITH HER OWN TWO HANDS

Today I went to a craft fair.  It happens annually where I live, and it is a marvelously archaic thing: people in booths selling things that they have made themselves.  It is something that has died a little, and which mostly lives a very private life (aided and abetted by the internet) in the secret corners of homes.  Long gone is a time when the man who sold you a thing could always safely be assumed to have been its originator.

I got a quilt today – not at the craft fair, but as a result of it.  It is beautiful.  It is beautiful in its imperfection and irregularity, because it was stitched many years ago by hand.  Every tiny stitch in it – I can see it from where I sit, and I still marvel at it – was created by the hand of a real person.  A real person cut the squares herself, every one of them, pieced them together with needle and thread, and carefully sewed long diagonal lines through the layers of the quilt.

It is hard to imagine that it was once more amazing to own something made by a machine than by a person.  I imagine young Laura Ingalls in my mind, reveling over a mass-produced dress and dismissing as ordinary many others, made with painstaking care by her own mother (not that Laura ever did any such thing, but it is exactly the kind of startling image I am thinking of).  Everything has been reversed now.  We instinctively carry with us a sense of wonder at anything that is made by hand.

I had several dolls when I was growing up.  I also had a wealth of stuffed animals – I did not want for inanimate playmates.  But around the time my family moved into what we still occasionally refer to as the “new house,” though it’s been fourteen years since that move, I went through a phase during which I preferred homemade dolls above all others.  There was something about making them myself that made them more special. 

I remember a particular doll made from a corn cob I found in our new yard (which I think my mother disapproved of, as she guessed that it had been set out for and discarded by a squirrel).  Another doll, which I named Minnie May after Diana Barry’s sister in Anne of Green Gables, was made out of scraps of yarn and a paper towel.  To my way of thinking, the less they resembled my “real” dolls, the better, and you would have been hard pressed to see any humanity in most of them.

Later I began to construct slightly more sophisticated toys by sewing together scraps of fabric from my mother’s sewing projects, stuffing them with smaller scraps, and embroidering crude (but endearing) faces onto the finished products.  The resulting crowd resembled nothing more than a flock of smiling miniature cushions, but the joy of having stitched them into being with my own two hands made them for weeks my most prized possessions.  Every cast-off portion of material represented a new opportunity for creation, and my little herd expanded steadily.

It is a maternal instinct which creates an appreciation for dolls in many small girls, and I think it was a similar instinct that was at play as I made my own dolls.  My creative acts were a rough approximation of giving birth, and I could not have been prouder of them than if they had really been my children.  It is not so different from parental pride, the feeling of satisfaction which one feels after making something new.

The analogy falls apart, of course, in the context of something like a craft fair.  These people were selling the things that they had made, and many of them were turning a pretty profit.  But my quilt was different.  It came not from a booth, but from an antique shop, where live the precious belongings of many people from days long gone.  The person who made it may no longer be living, and I have no reason to believe that she would have sold it any more willingly than I would have sold Minnie May.  I’d like to think that her children slept under it, and that it was well loved.  It was beautiful to them because their mother had made it with her own two hands.