Holding Hands

Holding Hands

A DIY Story By Diana Magnus

As a child I often fell asleep to the sound of my mother’s sewing machine. Its repeating whir was soothing and in a strange way, reassuring. This happened so often that as long as that machine whirred, everything was right in the world. My mother would create the most beautiful clothes: navy silk pleated blouses, bright pink wool pencil skirts, complicated blazers and perfectly tailored linen pants. Like magic.

Even more than the sewing machine, I loved the sound of my mother cutting out a new pattern. She would lay out the fabric on a our teak dining room table, carefully smooth and pin the tissue pattern to it and then take hold of her scissors. They were a beautiful pair: elegant, shiny, weighty and sharp. She would cut the entire pinned fabric with the lower blade running across our wooden table. This deep growling sound combined with the glinting blades scissoring through fabric, seemed to my child’s eyes, like some kind of menacing creature, eating its way across the table. As I grew older, I knew this deep growl also marked a new project being born. I would run to see what new marvelous thing my mother was going to make. We would smile and revel at the audacity of her new complicated enterprise. Then we would admire the precisely cut pattern pieces. Lifting them gingerly, I would admire how the layered cut edges would flutter and then land squarely in place, one perfectly beneath the other. The sheer joy of scissors meeting fabric has never left me. The sound, the gleam, the precise slice and weight in my hand are all part of their talisman-like status in my home.

A few years ago, when I was feeling inspired by the women textile art makers in my family, I started drawing. I drew lines across a huge piece of paper spread out on my floor. I drew the contour lines of the ancient Tatra mountains where my mother, grandmother and great grandmother were born. I drew lines of ancient reindeer migration routes and lines around the mountain lakes and rivers where my grandfather rode logs to market in valley villages. I cut along these lines and more. It felt satisfying and important. I was connecting to my distant family, a family I never knew. My parents emigrated from Czechoslovakia in 1965, escaping a harsh Communist regime. So growing up in Canada, I was raised without grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. But I imagined how they looked and laughed and finally as an adult I met them all and missed them dearly once I came back home to Canada.

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So I continued cutting across my drawn lines, I cut across the land where my grandparents grew crops, where my grandmother grew linen along a nearby river. Lines along mountains where they raised their sheep and lines where their shepherds built cabins to smoke the cheese they made with the sheeps milk. Where my grandmother thrashed linen reeds and wove them on her loom to make tablecloths and bed sheets. The cheese was smoked in hand carved wood molds in the shape of folkloric patterns.

To every piece of paper cut, I gave a number. Each a piece of the puzzle of my past. Every piece was then pinned to different fabrics and again I cut larger pieces of fabric sistered to each piece of the paper puzzle. Every piece cut with scissors as my mother had done, the lower blade running along the wooden floor, eliciting the same sound of every pattern piece cut by my mother on our dining room table. My present connecting to my past through sound, sight, touch, memory and feel. Total joy.

I hand stitched each piece of fabric to every piece of paper. Now it was a fabric puzzle. Hand stitching all these pieces together to create a multicoloured homage took many weeks and with every advancement, new happiness. The joy and comfort of using this ancient textile art making method, combined with my deeply personally drawn lines, connected me to my faraway family! I can’t hold the hands of my aunts and uncles and walk with them along the banks of their childhood rivers, but I can run my fingers along the sewn blue cotton rivers of my hand pieced textile and feel connected to them all in a profound and joyful way I never thought possible.

I’ve since created a second panel depicting a closer look at my family’s mountain rivers and the peaceful appearance of the bones of my ancestors floating along like the forest logs of my grandfather. These projects and the making of them bring me joy with every stitch and every glance. Not only do they help me make sense of the world and my place within it, but I hope they help my children feel the same joy and personal connection to a beautiful faraway land and remarkable family history.