Something about Needlework

Tokyo International Great Quilt Festival at Tokyo Dome

Last January (2013) I went to Tokyo International Great Quilt Festival with a friend in my weekend Japanese classroom. As far as I know, she is quite into knitting and needlework. My inspired interest in craftwork does not show an equal strength in my ability, and the end results of my work always fall short of the blue plans in my head.

My mother started patchworking a couple a years ago after her retirement. Like drawing, another activity in which she has been zealously engaged, quilting seems to provide an equal amount of pleasure of solitude. This other space - which her two hands create with cloth ruler, needles, fabric and colourful threads - is probably an alternative version of the space, which Virginia Woolf has called a room of one's own.

The exhibition space was packed with fervent weavers and covered with tapestries of breath-taking beauty. Although it might be true that most needlework must have been completed with the assistance of sewing machines, every piece of work is an amazing embodiment of imagination, impeccable details, intricate patterns, and combination of vibrant colours.

Awkward as I am, the efforts, attention and time that have been devoted to achieving such grandness are merely beyond calculation. What a gifted mind and patient heart of creativity it is behind the design of every single stitch!

Writing as an essential way of self-expression has been one of the popular domains for the discussion of female writers in literary history. It is commonly considered to be the main arena in which females are able to rival with their male counterparts. However, homely these other forms of domestic arts may seem - cooking, gardening, sewing, and stitching - they are never inferior to writing as an expression of creativity.

Remembering her mother's talent in gardening, Alice Walker celebrates that whatever her mother has planted in her garden would grow as if by magic. The blossoms then have provided a magical glass through which every suffering in deprivation is filtered and endured. In spite of the hindrances and limitations faced by African-American women at her times, the mother never forgets to be artistic in everyday life. She never forgets, or she has to remember, to create beauty and to bring in order to the domestic world.

It is an ability to hold on, as Walker notes.

What do we need to hold on to?

Being creative and staying creative is a means to endure a unfavourable reality, to create pleasure when faced with difficulties so as to live on.

To create is to be in control; to create is a self-assertion of presence.