In Patchwork: A Sewist’s Diary, writer/editor Maddie Ballard explores making seventeen garments over a period of great change in her life in a unique memoir that provides readers an inside look on how crafting can provide a sense of grounding when we need it the most.
We asked her to provide some books she turns to when she needs inspiration.
In the Hollow of the Wave by Nina Mingya Powles
Nina Mingya Powles’s work constantly inspires me, so I was very excited to learn that her new poetry collection deals explicitly with cloth and sewing. Among these poems we find a family sewing machine, quilts made by her grandfather, batik, a red Guo Pei 郭培 dress ‘more creature than garment’. Powles’ poems are full of beautifully tactile imagery and colour and link the history of textiles and the diction of sewing (‘slipstitch’, ‘seam’) with themes of identity, place, and colonialism in striking ways.
Garments Against Women by Anne Boyer
This strange, slim book is as elliptical and subtle as its title suggests, musing on the way capitalism and chronic illness make writing – and being – near-impossible. I’m including it here for the remarkable section (“Sewing”) that explores the way sewing is linked to female labour, the body, exploitation, and money. “A garment from a thrift store costs somewhere between 4 and 10 dollars. A garment at a garage sale costs 1 to 5 dollars. A garment from a department store costs 30 to 500 dollars. All of these have been made, for the most part, from hours of women’s and children’s lives,” she writes. I’ve read this section over and over and still find something to trouble me in it every time.
Worn: A People’s History of Clothing by Sofi Thanhauser
In this sweeping social history, Thanhauser considers the stories behind five types of cloth (linen, cotton, silk, synthetics, and wool). Well-researched, endlessly interesting, and panoramic in scope, this is a useful book to have to hand anytime you’re writing about textiles. I find myself constantly referring back to it to.
Many Hands Make a Quilt: Short Histories of Radical Quilting by Jess Bailey
This gorgeous zine by London-based art historian, writer, and quilter Jess Bailey charts some of the quilts that have shaped history – from Faith Ringgold’s story quilts to the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the largest community art project ever produced. I’m always inspired by this work, which offers stories of how quilting – a slow, communal textile craft – can be a political act.