transformational labor

even though we don't have to

You don’t have to sew your own clothes, but you can. It will take time and money. It will be messy. It’s sometimes inefficient. But there’s something satisfying about it— like there’s something satisfying about gardening, about baking— even when clothes, vegetables, and cakes are pretty easy to come by. Even when the bugs get the tomatoes or the cake is crumbly. How it feels, how it makes you feel, matters.

—How to Sew Clothes by All Well

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1. Work

I get off work at five and walk home. I put my bag down on the couch in the living room and go into my bedroom where I unfold the ironing board, place the iron on it, and take the cover off the sewing machine. I open the big glass door that separates my bedroom from the yard, thread the sewing machine with white thread and plug in the pedal and the power cord. My half-finished dress is retrieved from the shelf where it lays crumpled. By five thirty, I’ve gotten to work sewing.

It’s not always like this, the release from paid work and immediate immersion in another project, but the dress I’ve been working on is nearing completion, with just the pleats needing to be pulled into place, then the bodice sewed to the skirt. It’s exciting— those last steps before a project transitions from something I’m doing to something I did, and it makes for happy labor.

This summer, I’ve been working all the time. I work during the day, at my day job, and then I come home and work at what feels like my evening and weekend job, where I sew clothes and brew honey wine and dye cloth and write. In this way, I’ve made four shirts, a dress, a skirt, and a case for my laptop. I bottled the mead that’s been fermenting in the closet since last winter and I pickled garlic scapes from the farm. Recently I learned to leaf print, harvesting wild plants from around my house and fixing the pigment from their leaves on silk and linen and wool. 

The work is satisfying. It has some of the same monotonous quality of weeding the garden or hanging the laundry, except that the fruits of this labor are my cherished objects. I sew these clothes for myself because, firstly, I need to wear clothes and second, the ones I make by my own hand are affirming to who I want to show up as in this world. I canned all these tomatoes because when winter comes, I want to make food for my loved ones that makes them smile and say ‘wow.’ 

While I am at home with my projects, I can’t help but notice their similarities to what has traditionally been women’s work. It’s only in recent history that my home-canned tomatoes would be considered a quirky hobby. For most of time, a woman in the home would can tomatoes out of necessity. In Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, Adrienne Rich writes that from the beginnings of human civilization until the industrial revolution, humans at home “carried on an endless seasonal activity of raising, preparing, and processing food, processing skins, reeds, clay, dyes, fats, herbs, producing textiles and clothing, brewing, making soap and candles, doctoring and nursing, passing on these skills and crafts to the younger people.” Pre-industrial working class people, but especially women, worked long, hard hours at the tasks that I practice as an entertaining pastime. Even now, though we are not rendering fat for candles, American women spend more hours per day on housework chores than men. It makes me fear that my ancestral aunts and grandmothers would not agree with how much fun I’m having working on all these projects. Why don’t I just come home from work and watch TV?

Maybe it’s for the sake of the craft, of having creative control and high standards for my possessions. But that doesn’t exactly feel right. Many of the things I make turn out awkward, especially the first few times I make them. But I still experience excitement over finding cheap cloth at the thrift store and learning how to sew something new, fueled by the same burning weirdness that drives art. I find myself wanting to work on these projects each day the way a writer might make time for a the work of a novel, curious about how new patterns and combinations in a story will feel. This doesn’t feel like organic, expressive creativity in the way I imagine painting self-portraits in oil or heartfelt songwriting does, but it doesn’t feel like the menial work of washing dishes and emptying the litter box either. It feels like a different sort of labor altogether.

2. Transformation

One of the best books I read this year was Having and Being Had by Eula Biss. In it, she spends a chapter thinking about the difference between work (a job one does for money) and labor (the important stuff). Here’s her quoting Lewis Hyde on the matter:

Work, Lewis Hyde writes, is distinct from labor. Work is something we do by the hour, and labor sets its own pace. Work, if we are fortunate, is rewarded with money, but the reward for labor is transformation. “Writing a poem,” Hyde writes, “raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms— these are labors.” 

This reveals to me my problem. I want to give my life to labor, not work.

Here I am, at the end of summer, returning from my day job each day to practice the transformational labor of tending my land-based life. It is transformational, I realize, because it is pleasurable to me. Nobody is counting my hours. Unlike my female ancestors who were beleaguered with housework and childcare at a young age, I’m free to explore these homemade projects. The end result doesn’t belong in a portfolio or on a resume (dinner, a tomato plant, patches sewn onto a child-size shorts) but it doesn’t matter.

When I finally connect the skirt and bodice on the dress that I’ve spent so many evenings carefully piecing together, I get the same sensation as when I pick up a warm egg from between hen and hay in the chicken run. Something magical has occurred; the forces of the universe have come together in such a way that I’ve made a garment out of an old bedsheet, just as this clucking, alert animal has produced food for me to eat. There’s magic there, a giddy satisfaction born of relationship, and that satisfaction is powerful. Adrienne Marie Brown writes in “The Power in Pleasure” that one of the principles of pleasure activism is that our own happiness is good for the world. Specifically, happiness which is “derived from finding purpose in service to the world,”. This type of happiness “uplifts the collective spirit and eradicates the self-harming patterns of denial, repression, and self-negation.” When sewing this dress makes me come alive, that is in service to the world.

3. Politics

It also so happens that making things from scratch and doing them ourselves on a small scale is beneficial to the world outside of the pleasure it gives me. According to Sofi Thanhauser, author of Worn: A People’s History of Clothing,

between 2000 and 2014, clothing production around the world doubled. This was possible because clothing had become almost completely disposable. Over the course of this almost fifteen-year period consumers came to buy, on average, 60 percent more clothes than they used to, but kept each garment for half as long. By 2017, one garbage truck of clothes was burned or sent to landfills every second.

Too much stuff of poor quality is manufactured and thrown away every day. Textiles are a huge source of the excess of waste we are creating as humans on planet Earth. One response to this problem can be rooted back in pleasure. If I sew a garment myself, I’ll keep it around for longer and take the time to mend it. Continuous consumption is dependent on continuous waste, and a path away from waste begins with holding our belongings at a higher value— loving what we have because of the process it took to create. A transformation has occurred.

Unfortunately, developing crafty skills like sewing clothes and gardening as an approach to meeting one’s basic needs is not available to everyone. In Worn, Thanhauser points out that in the West, sewing and craftiness are hobbies of the middle class instead of survival methods of the poor. “It can even be cost prohibitive, since to buy the cloth to make a shirt will often cost more than the price of a new shirt.” The pleasure at the heart of my DIY activism is not available to people without access to a work space, a sewing machine, and a teacher (in my case it was YouTube and a mom who is also a seamstress). Likewise, the transformational power of garden-grown vegetables only works if your home has space for a garden or your neighborhood prioritizes community plots.

4. Invitation

This essay is sort of about sewing, but it could be about any process from which we have grown estranged and to which we might find joy in returning. I hope it does not come across like a reprimand in service of some greater good, but more as a meditation, a series of thoughts that have been braided together while I measure and iron.

I snip the thin white thread on the bottom hem of this dress. And there— it’s done. It doesn’t really fit (it’s bulky and awkward around the ribs) but that’s okay because I got the cloth at the thrift store and I had to make this wonky one in order to get to the next. I’ve been transformed by the process.

In my community, creativity and a dedication to craft are seeping through the cracks. Transformational labor rises through the sidewalk grates until we’re all wading in it, to and from our day jobs. This week, C sent me the animation she has been working on which is delightful in a way that subscription-based entertainment can never quite match. It’s the height of tomato season in B’s garden, and he can barely find enough homes for the rich, red, ripe fruits that grow abundantly on the vine. K built a bike that seats four, and tonight friends will gather at a cabin to play hand-me-down music we learned on fiddles and guitars. I’m writing this weird essay instead of watching TV, and I keep making shorts out of the colorful knits I picked up at The Fabrica. This labor that we are collectively doing, even under the confines of consumer-based capitalism, is unstoppable. Curious, bright people with the privilege of prioritizing creativity will continue to do what we have always done, which is to make things even though we don’t have to.

There is a future where the goods on which we depend do not originate with the labor of enslaved people and children across the earth. The DIY ethic is not only transformational in that it weakens a globalist system dependent on foreign production of cheapened goods and services, but it actually feels better. It’s so easy to forget the way a sun-warmed tomato tastes, the feel of a hand-carved and polished spoon, or the rough but real sound of a song sung by a friend. Remembering is close by and I’ll bet you can reach out and touch it if you try.