Small Ways | Sketching Slowly

Or embroidering in black & white

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Simple. Reachable. Doable. Small ways. They pack enough punch to change your world, or your day. Or maybe, simply and gloriously, they’ll change your moment. Small Ways is a series about small objects, small gestures, small touches. Small ways for living well.

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Embroidering is like coloring slowly, someone once said. I wonder, if I use only black floss, is it like sketching slowly?

I sit at the end of the sofa as the evening light fades, and with needle and thread, I sketch slowly. All the complications of the day, the sorting and figuring out of life, the deeper work, is paused, shelved until tomorrow. My mind unspools and my shoulders relax as I let go.

It feels meditative, this drawing of thread through a taut piece of muslin. The pop as the thread in the needle’s eye penetrates the fabric, the low whishhh as the length of the thread passes through. It quietly reminds that here, there’s no hurry, there’s no deadline, there’s no unpicking of complicated issues, or relationships, or circumstances. Here there’s just space and quiet and calm. Here there’s a blank canvas waiting for whatever tumbles out of my mind.

I begin near the edge with a curved stem stitch, then another. I add shading with parallel running stitches. It’s the beginning of a leaf, I decide. Without finishing it, I hop to the middle of the muslin and scatter an imperfect cluster of French knots. From this center, I begin stitching swooping shapes around it. Petals, I think.

All these stitches so far are done with two strands of floss. I wonder, then, about using a single strand, and how that would give a lighter weight line, and how line weights change the emphasis and depth in a drawing. Yes, I’ll try a single strand. And a backstitch, too, and a broken line of running stitches, only I’ll make them uneven, imperfect. Imperfect, yes, everything stitched into this cloth should be imperfect.

I’ve no idea what I’m sketching, really, as there’s no pattern printed on the fabric. There’s nothing to follow. Nothing to follow but ideas. Whims. This is my why. To mindlessly let my thread wander the fabric, to let it show me what it’ll become. In the end, it may be a jumbled mess, but in that mess, I may have done something, or tried something, or learned something. And in looking, I may see something in those black stitches, and in a millisecond, a new idea might beam through like sunlight spilling into a new day.

The idea of this slow sketching has been with me for a while. The stitches that I learned when I was a girl lay quiet, mostly, until I saw what Heather was doing back in the uncertain 2020 days, which lead to my habit of collecting more inspiration over time. Then, in January, slow sketching fell into my list of layering on.

Since then, over days and weeks, I gathered supplies. I found my embroidery scissors. I ordered a beechwood and brass hoop. I purchased black floss. I tucked a new set of golden-eye embroidery needles into my sewing box. I watched as the vest-wearing, white haired man from the hardware store, which is also the fabric store, seeming a bit out of his element, carefully cut a yard of muslin for me. I brought it home, laundered it and hung it to dry. In the drawing darkness of a midweek evening, I pressed the muslin and cut it to size, like pages ready for a book. I pressed a single sheet of it into the hoop and tightened the screw. Then one day, I gathered all my supplies on a vintage pewter tray.

Ready for sketching slowly.