One million joyful stabs

Learning how to stitch Sashiko properly is a slow process, one that leaves plenty of time to ponder life and culture.

I started my journey with a Creativebug video, where Lisa Solomon ran through the very basics of Sashiko stitching. I think it was a good starting point. It told me that I could draw the patterns myself, and that imperfection is totally fine, desirable even. For me, an impatient cheapskate, it made Sashiko an achievable goal.

I purchased some Sashiko thread from Evanston Stitchworks and surfed around the web for a pattern that would be easy to draw. The Kaki no Hana Hitomezashi (persimmon flower) stitch seemed easy enough for a beginner project since it was just a grid.

Alas no, it was not that easy. I went through a lot of spare paper trying to figure out where the lines should go. My clumsy stitches look fine though - I think it is very difficult to create ugly Sashiko when it is stitched with intention behind every movement.

My other frustration was that I started with the fabric that I would use to create an entire dress, rather than a small sampler square. It means that the satisfaction of completion arrives after months of work, rather than just a single night of stitching. On the other hand, I do get the satisfaction of seeing the quality of my stitching improve as I move my eyes across the dress.

The Kaki no Hana pattern was for one sleeve of the dress.

For the other sleeve, I tried out the Juji Kikko (crossed tortoiseshell) pattern. Looking at images of other people’s work, I thought I should try making my stitches smaller. And I did, until I got impatient and decided to switch to bigger hexagons out of pure laziness. Also my fingers hurt.

I found that the tailors chalk markings wore off halfway through the stitching, so I switched to drawing my lines with marker. This is not a washable fabric marker, but I am reasonably sure that it will fade when washed.

In the midst of this, I picked up a pair of chinos that my husband had ripped while riding his bike. There was a giant tear on the back, and even if I mended that one, there were many thin patches that threatened to open up with any more vigorous bike riding. I had hidden it inside my project basket because mending it seemed like a mountain too high to climb. The idea of visible mending reinvigorated me though, so I cut off the legs, nipped in the waist, patched the hole and gave myself a new pair of shorts. The added benefit of this is that now my husband hesitates before giving me more clothes to mend because he is afraid I will convert his entire wardrobe into more clothes for myself.

For the hem of the skirt, I was tossing up between the Shippo Tsunagi (Seven Treasures) pattern and the Asanoha (hemp leaf) pattern.

Shippo Tsunagi seems to be a very popular pattern. There’s a lot of information out there on how to draw and stitch Shippo Tsunagi, but I don’t know, maybe it's the neurotic little TeoChew girl inside me, I don’t feel comfortable putting a pattern representing Buddhism on a spot of my dress that was destined to be repeatedly sat on. Maybe I will stitch it onto a hat one day, and then the pattern can live on the crown of my head.

So despite looking very complicated, and promising an entire night spent with my ruler and pencil, Asanoha it was.

I didn’t realise that I should have packed a metric ruler in my suitcase when I moved to the US, but now I am paying the price by being stuck with inches.

While hunting for Asanoha stitching instructions, I came across the Upcycle Stitches website and spent a few days reading through the blog posts. Atsushi, who runs the website, says a lot of things that are different to the masses. He talks about the rhythm of stitching, how knots aren’t necessary, and what cultural appropriation means.

Cultural appropriation is something I think about a lot. It is the inevitable fate of any non-white person growing up in a majority white country. I was fortunate enough to be born deaf and have not had to listen to cultural taunting as a result, but I know my brothers, who are more socially attuned, were not so lucky. Even so, I have my own frustrations that I have not grown out of. My Vietnamese name is admittedly not easy to pronounce, but my grumbles were exacerbated when I witnessed the same mispronunciation be cemented in history in Avatar: The Last Airbender. Not the nonexistent M. Night Shyamalan movie - the original beloved Nickelodeon cartoon.

My barely functional ears heard Hugh. The captions said Hue. Sure the Avatar wiki says Huu, but offence was already there.

Incidentally my uncle is named Huu and my aunt, his wife, is named Sashiko. Their kids go to Chinese Sunday school because they found the Vietnamese and Japanese Sunday schools to be very exclusionary.

Anyway, that is an unrelated tangent that I needed to get out of my system.

I find Atsushi’s Facebook posts really interesting. He questions many of the norms that have been created in this white dominant society. Things like:

• Immigrants have to assimilate into white culture. Well why? Is white culture inherently better?

• Teachers should make it comfortable and easy for people to learn things. Well why? Why should the master go out of their own way to share their knowledge? Is it not arrogance to assume that the student is more important?

• Silence is disrespect. Well why? Is bothering people with lots of questions not disrespectful?

None of his troubles strike me as new. The Western world has been fascinated by Asian aesthetics for centuries, and simultaneously ignoring Asian cultures and exploiting Asian resources* for just as long. Every time Atsushi posts about cultural appropriation, he gets lots of comments admiring the stitching in his photo, and very few posts acknowledging his actual words.

*I wouldn’t be here if America and Russia didn’t decide to run their proxy war on Vietnamese soil.

North America’s dominant culture is one of materialism, and sees objects as expendable and places as exploitable resources. America loves the look of minimalism and the idea of konmari-ing, but laughs when Marie Kondo takes the time to thank material items for their service. Animism, the belief that all objects, places and creatures have a distinct spiritual essence, is a core element of konmari and the two cannot be extricated.

My understanding of Sashiko is that it is rooted in animism. The stitches are not there as pure decoration - they are placed into the fabric as a way of respecting and strengthening the fabric.

On the other hand, Western embroidery is a purely decorative craft, and if an item of clothing needs to be intentionally ripped up to make it look trendy, so be it.

Admittedly, there will be a level of discomfort in immersing oneself into Japanese culture in order to properly learn Sashiko embroidery. I find that I don’t care that people feel uncomfortable. Non-dominant cultures have already endured plenty of discomfort in merging into Western culture - it’s someone else’s turn now.

Anyway, I did what Atsushi said to do in his introduction to Sashiko page. I made a palm thimble out of some scraps of leather, fetched a longer needle out of my sewing box, switched up my hand posture, and stitched for hours.

And look, I have pretty stitches now!

The dress is not done yet, but that is another blog post.