Another spiral and a new bowl

Making things is the work of the soul.

I have tried something new this week. Pulling out my brand new sewing machine from its 15 year hibernation, I set out to make my daughter a rope and fabric bowl, the same kind of bowl I talked about a few weeks ago, made for my pregnant friend. Using leftover scraps from the quilt I made her last year (I really did only the cutting, my mom did the sewing, and I hired a woman to quilt it professionally), I began to work on this bowl. This is the bowl I will now use each year to tell her the story of her birth.

I chose the fabric scraps carefully, using materials that recall her sleep and play patterns: an old scarlet dress, flowery blue trousers, a striped baby onesie, and her pink crib sheet. When I look at these pieces, I remember. She will know that these were from her clothes and from her bed, but the memories these baby and childhood clothes evoke seem more like mine than hers.

As I begin to sew together this bowl, restarting five times until I succeed with the starter piece, a real test of patience for someone with very little, I notice the pattern forming, a spiral. Ah, yes, the beloved spiral appears as the base of this bowl. My daughter loves spirals, just like me, and I know she will like this bowl.

Often times when I make gifts or write verses for my children, I think the gifts are more for me. It is that way with birthdays especially. Of course, we celebrate each birthday as a special day to remember that child's birth, but since I was there too, and it happened to me, it is a day I remember that something in me was birthed. Yes, a child, but also a piece of my soul. I never tell them this, but I feel it on their birthdays. My childrens' birthdays are my birthing days too.

So as I make this birthday bowl, it is a bowl to celebrate my daughter's birth but also to celebrate my experience of birth, my celebration of creation, and my role in the process of life. It is when I finish the bowl and place it over my womb as if I am pregnant, it is that size, that I realize that this empty bowl holds power in its patterns.

The bowl is very imperfect, and while I am a recovering perfectionist, I did have a slight slip with the thought that I could unwind it and start over, and it would be neater, but I didn't. I will leave it how it is. I am trying to see that the imperfections help me remember the process of making it, giving it its shape and form, making spiral after spiral, smiling, and yes, even cussing. But all the other memories--like my daughter playing outside in the fallen leaves, wearing her Autumnal scarlet dress or placing her to bed on her pink sheets and the memory of her quick birth--these memories I remember too when I look at this bowl.

It is funny how it is not the end product that matters at all, but rather the experiences and memories of all that came before the bowl. But it is also about making the bowl, learning to see that if I actually slowed down, if I actually took my time and was not so focused on the end product, that I would not have had to go back over the many places where the zigzag stitches did not take hold and connect. But ah, that is the way it is in real life, isn't it? So often the same patterns emerge and re-emerge until they take hold.

For now, I like to hold this bowl and admire its powerful patterns, but I know I still have so much to learn.