The Day I Stopped Sewing

Earlier this year, two of my colleagues were killed in a car accident and I stopped sewing. I also stopped drinking for a while, which is odd in and of itself: I grew up in Denmark, and - like the Irish - we are known to drink to excess both in sadness and celebration. But it was the inability to sew that told me something was really wrong.

(A photo of my brother and me, probably the last year I wasn’t sewing. As you can see, however, we were really into coordinated outfits. I legit couldn’t say for sure which one is me and which one is my brother.)

Throughout my life, I have crafted items out of fabrics and yarn as a way to express and avoid emotions in equal measure.  During a painful breakup ten years ago, the first thing I did after that initial, disaster-defining, fight, was to dig out the most complicated pattern I could find and follow it to the letter, couture techniques and all. I still use the jacket I made - it is impeccably crafted, and it reminds me that beauty can grow out of pain.  When my estranged father tried to kill himself late last year, I moved in with my mother for a bit, and together we made a black-and-white quilt that mirrors the graphic oil paintings I remember from my childhood home. Every night I snuggle up in the soft cotton, knowing that home has meaning even when it is no longer there.

(OK, so this is not a quilt (in case you were wondering). This is a photo I found when I was looking through my father’s papers. This is my grandfather (the dude with the hat) and two queens. Except I think one might still have been a princess at the time.)

About five years ago, I discovered fabric design as an additional outlet. At the time, I was deeply unhappy in my job, a sentiment that translated into a temporary hatred of urbanity. The office was located in a particularly claustrophobic, downtrodden, and dingy part of New York City, and as a result I felt like I literally could only breathe when I was outdoors. I wanted to translate this feeling of relief - of life - into fabric, and so started printing flowers, snow, water, trees, pebbles, anything that helped me breathe, onto pieces of linen and cotton.

Before I knew it, the printing took on more importance than the sewing and design. My very first runway show was dominated by nature prints more so than coherent silhouettes. For a while, I didn’t make anything that didn’t carry my own prints. It felt like if I sewed anything with fabric I had not designed myself, it was somehow a cop-out, a lack of authenticity, a sadder, dimmer, carbon-copy of what I had imagined and felt.

In truth, for a short time there, fabric design and printing became the way I expressed pretty much anything, even petty spite and despair. When my father-in-law made hateful comments about immigrants (of which I am one) and immigrant children (of which I parent one), I translated my anger into marketable t-shirts and donated the proceeds in his name to a pro-immigrant organization. A miscarriage had me design another t-shirt with text expressing the flippancy I wanted to feel. The printing process prevented me from being a victim of the situation. I was doing something, and what I was doing had humor and grit. And then my colleagues died.

[Here’s a photo of my much missed colleague, Ana Paula, wearing one of Kær’s Kindness t-shirts. And one ofme wearing my miscarriage t-shirt.] I don’t know how to best explain that there is a clear before and after my colleagues’ deaths: there just is. And nowhere more so than in my creativity. It just went away. Sure, I sewed, but only realizing the vision of others. I made an impossibly romantic wedding gown for a friend’s friend, in a process that helped me focus love and loss in equal parts into tiny stitches of joy. I finally altered the many pants and jackets my husband long had begged me to outfit with zippers, hem, or otherwise make more useful. I raced through shirts I had promised my daughter to finish more than a year ago, but that somehow had been put on the backburner every time I had felt like realizing one of the colorful sketches that had been appearing in my mind.  Because after my colleagues died, the colorful sketches were just gone.

(Not everyone processes grief as loss of creativity. Here’s an amazing painting of our colleagues, Ana Paula and Sally, at a colleague organization in Honduras: Cattrachas.)

It’s been 8 months. This week I decided it was time. I pulled out a roll of fabric I designed years ago with oddly translucent cherry-red quince flowers on midnight blue. I picked a jacket pattern someone else made, complete with couture techniques and complicated twists. It will take weeks to make; the pockets alone took me a day. When I am done with the sewing, I will hand-wax it, transforming it from coarse linen into a leather-like shine. This process will also take days.  And when I am done, the sketches will come back. I know they will, because I can already see their shadows.

The birthplace of Kær: Samsø, the small island in the center of Denmark, where my mother lives and where I married the love of my life in 2014. This is where any creativity I have comes from: love