by Clare Hunter
Sewing not only traps memory; it can also help to rekindle it. Some years ago, I ran sewing workshops in a psychiatric unit of an Edinburgh hospital where I was working with a small group of elderly people whose lives had shrunk to the limits of the hospital’s footprint. Each week those in the group suffering from dementia would be unsure of who I was and what I had to do with them. I would be greeted with scathing remarks like ‘I suppose you’ve come for that nonsense,’ or ‘What mess are you here for?’ as they grumbled their way to their chairs.
I would bring out their work in progress and, as I handed them round, each person would examine their creation forensically, turning the fabric this way and that, smoothing skeleton fingers over the imprint of its stitchery, taking time to wonder at it being there at all. One by one, I would bring them back to whatever they had begun and, once fixed to their task, they would reconnect to a past skill, an able self: the feel of the cloth and the rhythm of sewing triggering a physical memory. Once reconnected with their needlework, they held their sewing tightly in their hands, as if it were a precious harbinger of an elusive now.
Quilts are increasingly used as a way to help people with dementia relocate themselves and their families through the tactile rekindling of shared memories. Vintage fabrics, familiar buttons, evocative textile textures all serve to make personal links, to rediscover a thread of self. The charity Alzheimer Scotland has its own quilter-in-residence, Ann Hill. Her quilts stimulate not just sensory recall, but also family conversations, a way for a carer to get to know more about the individual in her charge, personality and autobiography revealed through touch that re-awakens personal meaning.
In 2013, Ann masterminded what she called the Hampden Park Quilt Challenge: a call to quilters to create enough quilts to cover a huge football pitch in Glasgow as a fund-raising event for Alzheimer Scotland. In all, 5,000 quits were donated. Some were memory quilts, designed in reminiscence sessions with people suffering from dementia, stories retold through a quilter’s needle and thread. The quilts went back to those who had inspired them, the re-gathered strands of a forgotten sense of self helping them reconnect the past with the present.
Each winter, Aunt Jean’s quilt covers our bed. Torn in parts, faded in others, it acts as a link between now and then, folding where others have folded, mending where others have mended. Lying beneath it, we lie where others have lain. It is our keepsake and our protection. Suffused with past spirits, it is both a celebration and a commemoration of the story of other peoples’ lives.
7
Protect
One frosty March morning in 1996, my neighbour phoned me in a state of dread. Her husband, a local minister, had received an urgent call to go to Stirling Royal Infirmary, where he was chaplain. There had been a serious incident at Dunblane Primary School. She knew nothing more. Later that morning we learned that a gunman had walked into the school, gone to the hall where the Primary Ones were having their gym lesson and shot dead sixteen five-year-olds and their teacher in little over three minutes. More children and staff were injured before he turned the gun on himself.
Televised news reports showed terrified parents, keeping vigil by the school gates, waiting for news of their children. Eventually they showed scenes of some parents being reunited with their children while others were led into the school. There, it was reported later, they were told of their children’s death or injury. The traumatised families and community of Dunblane could barely comprehend the nightmare that had been unleashed on their small Scottish town that Spring morning.
I had recently been commissioned by Strathclyde Regional Council to make a series of banners with and for communities as part of Glasgow May Day parade. Now one of these would be for Dunblane. I sewed an angel with ivory wings nestling a child in her arms. The child is stretching up to try to touch the stars in the sky. Sixteen silver stars symbolised Dunblane’s dead children: Emma, Joanne, Megan, Hannah, Victoria, Kevin, Melissa, David, Brett, John, Sophia, Charlotte, Ross, Mhairi, Abigail and Emily. A single gold star honoured their teacher, Gwen Major, who had died in their defence. I encrusted the angel’s cream silk robe with blood-red embroidered poppies and below the starry sky and beneath the angel and child, I stitched a quotation from Laurence Binyon’s First World War poem, For the Fallen: ‘At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.’ This was chosen by my neighbour the minister, who’d had to find comfort for the families of the dying and the injured that morning and in the days that followed, as well as words for the bereft parents sitting next to the bodies of their children in Stirling Royal Infirmary.
It was to this very hospital, just a year earlier, that my husband and I had gone when I twice became pregnant, when I twice miscarried. The great gentleness and concern we had found there helped to salve our grief at the time. And I stitched those poppies and appliquéd those stars with our own lost babies in my heart. The banner mourned the promise of children that were no more and the loss of a family that might have been. It was carried through the streets of Glasgow that May Day, then donated to the infirmary, where it was installed in its tiny chapel, hanging above the book of remembrance in which people could write something of those they had lost. I wrote about our children there.
Protecting our family is one of the most primal of human urges. It is not just illness or accidents that must be guarded against; protection in many cultures must reach beyond the threats of the physical world to the darker realms of the supernatural. There, some believe, dwell malevolent spirits who can blight a harvest, maim a child, blind a father or make a woman infertile in a nonchalant nanosecond. Such beliefs are not rooted in naive superstition. They are based on the evidence of ancestors and a lived experience of the fickleness of nature. Even today, many societies fear and respect worlds beyond their human understanding, worlds they believe can alter destiny. The evil eye, capricious gods or malign spirits are all in constant need of thwarting, distracting or appeasing.
Traditionally in many cultures throughout the world, embroidered textiles were thought to be as efficacious as a shield for protecting human beings in this world and the next. Imbued with the force of nature – the plants from which dyes have been extracted, from which thread has been spun – textiles provided a natural armoury to ward off attack. Through needlework, however, greater defences could be assembled to ensure human safety.
Evil could slip and slide into any opening. Clothes, therefore, were cunningly constructed to withstand danger especially in areas most vulnerable to entry. The hems, cuffs and necklines of many traditional garments were densely patterned in an array of different colours. This was no idle fancy for ornamentation, but purposeful safe-guarding. The reproductive zones, such as breasts, pubic triangle and genitalia, were protected with intricate embroidery and embellishments on the cloth that covered them. Some traditions persist. The mirrored bodices of the Rabaris tribe in India, the floral twists and turns of folk costume aprons in Eastern Europe, the repetitive cock’s comb symbol stitched into shaman’s regalia in southwest China are all designed as guards against trespass.
An uncut cloth, such as a sari, offered the most effective sanctuary. It had no seams to penetrate; its wholeness was defence enough. The skirts of the Batak tribes of Sumatra were woven as circles so there would be no beginning and no end, and the pleated men’s skirts in Greek folk costume were unbroken spheres with no obvious point of entry. Neither seams nor gussets could be ignored or left unguarded. They had to be camouflaged, over-sewn with braid or bands of stitchery.
And complexity is still sewn into traditional cloths. The bawan bagh (wedding shawl) of the Punjab in India can have as many as fifty-two stitch patterns in one cloth. Kuba cloth from the Democratic Republic of the Congo has a repertoire of over 200 stitch patterns. The folk art embroidery of Karnataka in India can include more than 60 motifs in a variety of colours. The simple chain stitch is commonly used in India because each stitch is linked to the next, allowing no gap for evil to penetrate. Its
deployment, along with that of other intricate stitches, is designed to create unassailable barriers.
But in the way in which they sewed, embroiderers who followed tradition, ensured extra safeguards. They cunningly created intentional diversions in order to disconcert harmful spirits, such as deliberately interrupting the flow of a pattern to abruptly change direction, altering the type of stitch used, introducing a sudden change of colour, piecing strips of cloth in conscious irregularity, intermingling different needlework techniques and using appliqué and patchwork on the same cloth.
Embroidered safety was not limited to clothes. Wells, springs, crossroads, wash basins, mirrors, windows and hearts were all thought to be susceptible to the encroachment of malign forces. But the proximity of textiles sewn with defensive strategies deflected harm. The space, that layer of so-called thin air, that separates earth from heaven, the temporal from the spiritual, was protected by sewn canopies. Women’s headdresses and men’s caps served a similar purpose: in part a protection against the encroachment of evil but also signalling humility to the Gods above.
The threshold was the most significant place in the home, as it represented the crossing from one life to another, from public to private and from community to family. It required special protection. Textile hangings draped over, around or above doorways, often fringed and tasselled, presented a barrier of moving energy to discourage evil trespass and, through embroidered symbolic motifs, they bestowed blessings on those who entered and the promise of safe-keeping. Hindu curtains made in the Punjab called ‘torans’ usually still feature an irregular number of flaps along their bottom edge, a device originally adopted to confuse evil spirits by their lack of symmetry. Even today churches, temples, mosques and synagogues make use of curtains to demarcate an outer secular space from an inner sanctum. The Kaaba, the house of Allah at the centre of The Sacred Grand Mosque in Mecca, has interior and exterior hangings. Its sitara (curtain) is hung up on the ninth day of the Islamic month of Dhu’l-Qi’dah, one of the four sacred months in the Islamic calendar. Stitched with invocations, supplications and Quranic verses in gold and silver thread the presence of the sitara amplifies the spiritual and devotional significance of the Kaaba itself. Even in a modern secular world fabric is used to divide the worlds of the known and the unknown, witnessed nightly in the raising and lowering of the curtain in theatres around the world.
While patterns and symbols were the conductors of protective warnings, colour added another defence, a preventative sub-text. It underscored cultural signals with additional safeguards. Red was thought to be the most efficacious. As a transmitter of positive energy, it represented the passion and strength of the blood of life and had the power to guard against harm and promote fertility. It became the dominant colour for celebration and campaign. Blue represented the power of water, an essential element of survival, and being the colour of the sky it symbolized the heavens and spirituality. Green signified youth and new life; black, the earth, ever-present and everlasting. In many cultures, it became the colour of mourning.
Embedded deep and still within all these various forms of protection are talismanic symbols. Ciphers in needlework have complex meanings. The exact implications of many ancient symbols are lost to us today, their significance has blurred over time even to those who still sew them. And generation upon generation have extended or changed their meaning until they no longer can be ‘read’ with any certainty. A few, however, have endured with clarity: the heart of love, the tree of life, the butterfly of liberation. Most widely used is the triangle, one of the most ancient of protective symbols, which represents the pubic site of women’s fertility, the peaks of a defensive mountain range, or the teeth of a saw or of a dragon. It persists as an agent of defence still apparent in the bunting we use to decorate our local fêtes and children’s parties.
Even when all this was done – seams hidden, the complicated patterns embroidered, the symbols stitched – traditions dictated that extra defences be added by attaching light-reflective or mobile adornments like sequins, small mirrors, beads, tassels, shells, bells, coins and fringes to gleam, flutter and clink if evil spirits venture too close to humans. For the stitching to be effective there had to be plenitude, a cumulative force. Additionality was all.
It was not only a matter of preventing the ingress of evil, however: benign gods must also be courted and appeased. This required different strategies. In some cultures, leaving a tiny part unfinished or including an intentional mistake was thought to placate the gods and not invite their jealousy or anger at the sight of humans aping divine perfection. Palestinians introduce a different colour or a blue bead to deliberately mar their needlework so as not to risk the envy of the gods. The Amish in America insert small errors into their quilts so that God will not think them prideful. In Japan monks sew a small rough patch on to their robes to signal their humility to the Buddha, and in the Ukraine, they embroider a different colour of thread on a small section of just one sleeve of a bridal shirt to attract spiritual approval.
It is not just what is stitched, but how it is sewn that has meaning. Tibetans sew with the needle pointing towards the body, pulling in the needle’s strength to combine with their own to create more power in the stitch; whereas the women of India and Pakistan make phulkaris (the flower-embroidered shawls and head scarves from the Punjab) by pointing the needle away from themselves so that it comes from the heart and goes out to others. In some cultures, a marriage quilt is begun with a cross stitch, left to right signifying a woman, right to left signifying a man, their union marked as an anchor for what might follow. Embroiderers often embed secret stitches as private talismans. In Ukraine, they embroider from the bottom to the top to follow the path of life, and the needle that starts the works must be the same one that finishes it, so the flow of its energy will not be broken. Any mistakes are left as they are, in the belief that the past cannot be undone.
In all cultures, it is babies and children who are the main focus of safeguarding. In some it is believed that a baby is born adrift from the human world and, unless its family proves its human identity, the spirits will claim it for themselves. Most cultures, conscious of a baby’s vulnerability, have traditionally protected their new-borns with sewn coverings to keep them safe.
The Rabaris tribe of India stitched cradle covers with wide borders made from numerous narrow strips of embroidered patterns in a dazzle of different colours and patterns to confuse and overwhelm malign spirits. In the centre of their cradle covers they appliquéd auspicious symbols as appeals to benign gods to keep watch. The Turkmen in Central Asia swaddled their infants in specially decorated appliquéd bands, embroidered with warnings to would-be intruders from the spirit world. They sewed doga, tiny triangular amulets, which were worn by a child or hung above its bed, sometimes filled with additional talismans such as a verse from the Koran, salt or coal crystals, a rag from a powerful person or protective herbs.
In Japanese tradition, a mother’s spirit, identity and strength were transferred to her new-born by the re-fashioning of her own clothes into her infant’s swaddling cloth, ensuring an adult defence. Similarly, an Indian grandmother provided her own embroidered phulkari as a baby’s first protective shawl, and in parts of China they dressed the baby in clothes made from fabric cut from cast-off family clothing. Georgian Jews went further in the deception: they sometimes clothed their babies in old garments from family members but turned them inside out or dressed boys as girls, and vice versa, in a desperate effort to confuse the spirits.
It is not only the nature of the cloth that could safeguard babies, but also the act of stitching itself through which the protective hand of a mother or grandmother was evident. A Hawaiian mother believed that the sewing of a quilt for her baby imbued the quilt with her own aura to keep her child safe. In West Punjab, the grandmother puts in the first stitch of a new-born’s cradle cover. In Tajikistan, a marriage coverlet is begun by the mother of many children. The garment made for a Jewish boy’s ci
rcumcision was traditionally sewn by a mother who had never lost a child. In parts of China the protection of children used to be a community affair. A new mother would be brought strips of cloth by neighbours to be joined and made into a baby’s coat, a communal cloak of combined cherishing. Alternatively, families would bring the mother small pieces of embroidered silk to be pieced into what was known as the Hundred Families Coat, so that the strength of many – the many pieces, stitches, blessings, families – would ensure a child’s safety. The same concept existed in Japan, although not for children but for soldiers going into battle. The senninbari (the ‘one-thousand stitch belt’) was a protective talisman made by female relatives who went to a busy location, such as a railway station or street corner, and collected stitches from passers-by, which they were asked to sew on a stretch of cotton. Once 1,000 stitches had been gathered, the belt was given to the soldier as a form of protection, the accumulation of many diverse energies acting as a human shield against his injury or death. Some of these customs prevail, others have been replaced by the making or purchasing of more modern talismans.
When my twins were eight, in 2006, they came home from school with pompoms. They told me how they’d made two discs of cardboard with a hole in the middle and pulled wool round and round until the discs were very fat and the hole had disappeared. Then they had cut the outer edges and tied a ribbon around the middle. Once the cardboard was torn away, to their astonishment they had a big fluffy ball, a transformation of their own making from flat to round, hard to soft, still to dancing. I told them they had also made magic: that from just a bit of cardboard and a length of wool they had created a talisman to keep them safe. Because that is what a pompom is: a protective charm that sees off evil with the bounce of its bobbing sphere. Its origins are uncertain but its use has been widespread through time and place: on the headdress of the Viking God Freyr in Norse mythology, the traditional Balmoral caps of Scottish Highlanders, the national costume of Greece, the hats of Hungarian Hussars and as ornamentation on Peruvian dress. We still knit or buy baby hats with pompoms, unaware that we are carrying on an ancient tradition of protecting our children by making wearable adornments to deflect evil spirits.