Tag: crafts

Dancing Through It

During my husband’s cancer treatment, when the days were measured out in appointments and blood counts and the strange, suspended time of waiting rooms, I found myself stitching three embroideries at once. It wasn’t planned. It was simply what my hands reached for when my mind couldn’t settle.

One was Cézanne’s Skulls; a blunt little memento mori, because death was suddenly no longer an abstraction but a visitor who might or might not come inside.

A second piece was the two hands from the Sistine Chapel: creation, re‑creation, the possibility of being remade.

And the third was Renoir’s La danse à Bougival — life, movement, colour, and the stubborn insistence that joy still exists somewhere, even if only in thread. (In my head, my inner 15-year-old who survived the ’70s still insists on translating it as The Dance at Boogie Ville.)

My hands rotated between them like a tarot reading for our future, pulling the thread of death in the morning, creation in the afternoon, and the dance at night. Holding all three threads at once because we didn’t yet know what the prognosis would be.

Renoir painted his dancers in 1883, all flirtation and whirl, the world blurred around them. A moment of pleasure caught mid‑spin. The Belle Époque loved that kind of scene — the fantasy of effortless joy, untouched by illness or fear or the price of survival. A world where nothing truly bad happens, at least not on the canvas.

But I stitched my dancers in a very different world.

Embroidery is slow. It’s repetitive. It’s the opposite of a sweeping painterly gesture. Each stitch is a small decision to continue. A tiny act of faith. Renoir’s dancers move quickly; mine accumulated over weeks, in the quiet hours between scans and consultations, in the evenings when we didn’t yet know which way the story would go.

Somewhere along the way, the embroidery stopped being about Renoir at all. The dancers became us in meaning, two people trying to keep moving while the world tilted. Two people holding on to the possibility of life, even when life felt precarious.

Queer life has always been lived in that tension: fragility on one side, insistence on the other. We have a long history of caretaking in the dark, of building sanctuaries when the world outside feels indifferent. We make beauty in the middle of fear. We build domesticity not as an idyll but as a shelter. We create altars out of ordinary things — a stitched picture, a kitchen table, a quiet evening when nothing dramatic happens except that we are still here.

The AI‑generated room in which I placed the photo of my embroidery makes it look like a shrine, which in a way it is. The surrounding space is minimalist, immaculate, and stark, mimicking the quiet, clinical suspension of the waiting rooms we left behind. But in the centre sits this dense, textured artifact of human touch. A small domestic altar to survival. A reminder that while we waited for news that could have broken us, I sat and stitched a dance.

Renoir painted the moment before the world intrudes.

I stitched it while the world was already intruding, and somehow that made the dance matter more.

My husband survived, and the dance went on. The embroidery became less a shrine to fear and more a reminder of what we carried through.

Life didn’t return to what it had been: illness like that never lets you go back. But we went on, into a different life, one we’re still learning how to inhabit.

Still Life with Thread and Memory

On the table, a workbox opens like a small domestic theatre. A hoop holds a half‑formed vase of blue, the printed pattern waits beside it, and two pairs of glasses rest as if they’ve stepped out of the scene for a moment. Nothing here is finished; everything is in motion.

If revenge is a dish best served cold, then mine has had half a century to chill. I grew up in a school – and a society – determined to press me into a narrow shape. Because I was a boy, I was funnelled into woodwork, metalwork, technical drawing. I was predictably terrible at all of them. What I was good at was attracting homophobic jeers from teachers and pupils alike. But even then, I was stubborn. I insisted on taking cookery, refusing to waste any more timber or scorch any more metal, and quietly preparing for the day when I would no longer be living under my mother’s roof. I needed to know how to feed myself.

Even I knew I couldn’t push things much further than a Victoria sponge. I failed the exam anyway – not for lack of skill, but because I served pork with pears. “You can’t put meat and fruit on the same plate,” the examiner sniffed, until I reminded her about pork and apple sauce. By then I already had a reputation for being “difficult” and “answering back.”

Asking to join the girls for sewing or knitting would have made the local paper. So I taught myself to sew on a button and left it at that.

Decades later, having escaped the small island and lived several lives in the Netherlands, I was recovering from an illness when I wandered down a spring‑speckled Dutch street and stepped into a craft shop. The owner couldn’t have been kinder. A man asking how to begin embroidery – she didn’t blink. She taught. I learned. I brought home threads and fabric and needles and hoops, and with them, the quiet satisfaction of cocking a fifty‑year‑old snoot at those vile teachers.

Embroidery didn’t begin as a craft for me. It began as revenge – and as permission to do something I’d forbidden myself for half a lifetime. Now it has become a way of making a small, steady place to be. A way to occupy the hands when the world feels too loud. A practice that rewards patience rather than speed.

A hoop, a pattern, a pair of glasses, a tangle of threads: the beginnings of a discipline that teaches me how to look, how to slow down, how to stay with something long enough for it to become mine.

Every stitch is a small decision to stay. This is where the peace begins – in the quiet work of making something that didn’t exist before.