Crafting My Way toward Accomplishment
It was early October when I updated my friend Kim about how I’d been spending my very single, mostly alone time in isolation during the coronavirus pandemic. “I’ve taken up watercolors. And also embroidery,” I said one night over FaceTime. Demure lady that she is, she covered her mouth and daintily laughed into her palm, the refined equivalent of a spit take, before regaining her composure. This—in spite of omitting the fact I’d also begun propagating a handful of succulents and had resumed playing the piano, which I began learning at age five, thanks to my parents’ insistence that I have, in their words, “something to fall back on.”
“Well, aren’t you accomplished?” she said, her shoulders shimmying beneath a sweatshirt in the rectangular screen. As a fellow English major, she knew all too well what this turn of activity sounded like—a nostalgic dip into the quaint society depicted by Jane Austen, the intimate and domestic world of sitting rooms, written correspondence, gentleman callers, and the accomplished ladies who try to charm them. We had both long held romanticized notions of becoming refined and elegant and we were both very into the nuanced looks, concealed emotions, and social niceties evident in portrayals of the time period, but the surprise on her face told me it was one thing to engage with that world academically, through literature or TV, and another to attempt to live it.
“It’s fun,” I said, as I held one finished embroidery piece, still secured in its beige plastic hoop, up to the camera. It was a still life of three unassuming houseplants in baskets—winding ivy vines, a leafy fern, and a bumpy mound of French knots with wandering tentacles that was struggling to pass for a string-of-beads plant. “And yes, yes I am,” I added, with a touch of maniacal giddiness about my new hobbies, mostly because they seemed so ludicrously extra and, therefore, at odds with my usual practicality—not to mention my minimalist, modern aesthetic. From my clothes to my apartment décor, I favor crisp lines and plain colors over any ornate or frilly patterns. My wardrobe is a uniform of Everlane T-shirts and jeans. I insisted upon gallery-esque bold, black frames for the pictures I hung on the wall behind my couch. I like perfection and order—I am not what you would call an artsy, DIY person.
So, even in the middle of a strange and uncertain pandemic year, the strangeness of what I was doing was not lost on me. What was I doing crafting? Granted, when I picked up embroidery, I had been stuck indoors, riding out the summer at my parents’ house, with nothing else to do and few other people to talk to; but now the year was sliding into fall and I was back in my studio apartment, spending my weekends bent over my standing desk, sweeping a No. 6 size paintbrush across a sheet of watercolor paper. It must have been at least ten years, around the time I graduated from college and entered the nonstop hustle culture of modern work, since I’d last done something so openly time-consuming and pointless. In the intervening time, I’d been suckered into feeling like I always needed to be doing something productive, with purpose, which crafting surely was not, in spite of its large role in defining the relative value of Regency-era ladies in society.
The idea of the accomplished woman has lingered in the back of my mind since I first read Pride and Prejudice my sophomore year of high school. To be an accomplished woman in the Georgian era, according to Caroline Bingley, was to “have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, all the modern languages; and besides all this . . . possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions.” Mr. Darcy only adds to the impossible list “the improvement of her mind by extensive reading,” which prompts Elizabeth Bennet to question how he knows any accomplished women at all. Taking into consideration The Polite Lady; Or, A Course of Female Education, a series of letters from a mother to her daughter at boarding school, published in 1798, the list continues to grow, with geography and sewing also enumerated as requirements.
For any woman, past or present, these standards are a lot. Accomplishment during that time, regardless of household practicality, was considered evidence of education and character. The more accomplished a woman was, the more marriageable she was believed to be. Let’s say for a minute that I was interested in marriage as an end goal, I still can’t understand how accomplishments in such a range of mostly frivolous activities proved a woman’s worth. While sewing might have been an important skill for women of the Regency era, it’s hard to make the argument that embroidery could be anything more than ornamental. The ability to mend clothing was essential, the ability to embellish a pair of slippers less so. Singing and dancing might have been useful for entertaining evening guests, but what use was drawing? When a woman was expected to stay at home, when would she ever have the chance to use all the modern languages?
I was on board with the value Mr. Darcy placed on a woman’s mind, but everything else sounded superfluous and irrelevant to me. And as a result, I’ve dismissed arts and crafts, subconsciously linking them in my mind to childhood school projects and this outdated notion of female worth. I chased academic achievements and later professional accomplishments in the workplace instead, trying to derive satisfaction from every promotion and raise. Caught up in the idea of ascending the endless corporate ladder, I felt I didn’t have any time to waste on silly hobbies. My coworkers picked up knitting, crochet, and macramé in their spare time and showed me the results of their labors, which, while impressive, held no appeal to me. I scoffed and told myself crafting had no place in the life of a serious adult.
But when COVID-19 arrived, followed by waves of lockdown and stay-at-home orders, I suddenly found myself more receptive to the Regency-era hobbies I’d once disregarded. Single, released of the excuse of busyness, and confined to home, all but cut off from seeing my companions aside from the occasional outdoor walk, I felt a lot like a Jane Austen heroine myself. I needed an escape, or some way to feel like I was doing something worthwhile, and so I imagined myself transported to another time, a time when ladies needed to possess, as the Austenian character Emma Woodhouse does, “a reputation for accomplishment,” and turned to craft.
It was early July when I started on the embroidery kit I’d ordered on Etsy. It included the plastic embroidery hoop, a square of canvas printed with a turquoise outline of three houseplants, a single needle, embroidery floss in shades of green varying from pine to mint, and a set of sparse instructions that labeled different sections of the design with the type of stitch and the color of the thread. Puzzled, I picked a simple-looking basket section—“straight stitch, 04”—and began to work my threaded needle through the fabric.
Sitting on my couch, cross-legged, I felt very silly holding what seemed to me artifacts of female oppression, but soon I found I liked the repetitive nature of embroidery—the shallow plunk of the needle piercing the taut canvas, the friction of pulling the thread and tightening a stitch so that there was no slack. It required enough concentration to strategize about how to approach a stitch and travel efficiently across the design, but not so much that I couldn’t watch reruns of The Great British Baking Show while doing it. I began to see how it would have made an ideal pastime for ladies in sitting rooms who wanted to gossip while maintaining the guise of productivity, which, to be fair, basically described me at that point of the pandemic.
Over the next few evenings, I sank into the plane of the fabric and took pleasure in the slow progress of filling in the dark outline of the ivy and the angled leaf stitches of the fern. I continued section by section, moistening one end of the thread before pushing it through the eye of the needle, positioning the needle’s point just beyond the outline, later securing the stitches with a prim knot when the thread ran out. It was so relaxing I almost regretted reaching the end, though my lightly throbbing, punctured fingertips disagreed.
When I held my handiwork to the light, admiring the delicate knots and the gentle bend of the leaves, I was surprised to find I did feel something akin to accomplishment. Would my stitching have landed me a husband in the time of Jane Austen? Probably not—bits of turquoise outline poked through around the edges of the plants, and in places, I’d used the wrong thread thickness so the basket detail was more pronounced than it should have been. But perhaps that very imperfection was part of the point—I was proud that I’d created something so wonderfully tactile and textured and flawed and unique with my own hands. I was by no means good, but I liked the feeling of having produced something all my own so much that I decided to continue my foray into crafting and try watercolor painting next.
Again, I began with a kit—it seemed that since I’d started embroidery, all my Instagram feed would show me was ads for craft kits. This one was part of a three-month watercolor subscription box from the company Let’s Make Art that my friends had given me for my birthday and included all the paint, paper, and instructions for four projects. Technically, September’s box focused on painting with gouache, which is a water-soluble medium like watercolors, but is opaque, making it easy to disguise mistakes. Or so I hoped.
I cleared my desk, set out red plastic cups of water for rinsing, ordered a paint palette and a set of brushes, and got to work. Over the course of a month, following the video tutorials released each week, I squeezed dollops of color out of the thimble-sized metallic tubes onto my palette and swirled them around, blending and mixing new colors that always seemed to dry out faster than I could use them. I would hustle to follow along with the tutorials, which the instructor kept intentionally quick to help us novices make decisions and keep moving. One week, I caked on layers of orange to form the flesh of a lopsided papaya. Another week, I painted large, ever-lightening swaths of pink and peach that became a rose-hued midnight sky. Using my No. 2–size brush, I dotted gloopy white stars and a wonky crescent moon into the scene. The next week, I swept shades of green across the page to form a grassy field and then carefully drew dark, plum-colored mountains in the distance. And finally, at the end of the month, I dabbed canary yellow and azure between the outline of a kingfisher I had traced with graphite onto a sheet of sturdy cold-press paper.
When I’d started painting, I formed a vague hope that I could eventually gift my creations to friends without insulting them, but seeing the crude quality of the artwork, I quickly abandoned this idea. Across all my projects, the paper had curled up at the edges from an excess of water. There were random, translucent splotches among the thicker swatches of paint. The layers were uneven, the transitions between colors too jarring. My strokes bled into each other in an unintentional, unattractive way.
Even for a beginner, the paintings were obviously horrendous, the very opposite of accomplishment. Under normal circumstances, perhaps this would have been upsetting, but here, now, since I was doing something so out of character during a global pandemic, I couldn’t help but laugh at myself. I could have hidden the efforts from my friends, felt ashamed of the attempt, but oddly enough, I felt fine, even proud in spite of myself, and showed them anyway. So what if I had no innate talent, no hidden skill at painting? At least I had tried, and in so doing, I discovered there was a certain pleasure in being new and unmistakably awful at something, in trying and failing, and trying again anyway. Suddenly, freed of all expectations and of my long, perfectionist streak, I could enjoy my newfound leisure time and just play. I mixed more paint, dunked my brushes into pools of color, washed pigment onto the page. I had no hope of ever remotely being considered accomplished at painting, but nevertheless, I was having an excellent time.
By late December, crafts had a more permanent place in my routine. I had finished another embroidery piece—a charming rendering of the storefront of a French boulangerie—and had just started cross-stitching two steaming cups of coffee onto Aida cloth. I was in the middle of counting stitches one day while watching the first episode of the Regency-era romance Bridgerton on Netflix when what should have been an unremarkable scene caught my attention so fully, I had to set down my embroidery hoop.
At Danbury House for the first ball of the London season, debutantes in shimmering, beaded ballgowns, sparkling tiaras, and skintight, elbow-length evening gloves were boasting of their accomplishments to eligible bachelors, attempting to secure matches and avoid what the snarky, narrating voice of Lady Whistledown calls “the dreadful, dismal condition known as the spinster.” The camera circles the blush-tinged room, and one woman mentions her love of dancing. Another, gardening, and finally, one anonymous young lady remarks to a blandly attractive, dark-haired gentleman, “I must show you my watercolors sometime.” Her desperate mama leans in, keen to make an impression, and follows up with: “And she’s quite proficient on the pianoforte too!” I laughed aloud to myself, reminded of my own new and questionable quarantine pastimes.
Of course, I’m not so naïve as to believe my lack of artistic accomplishments is actually responsible for my singleness. It’s not as though I suddenly intend to seduce a man during a pandemic with my embroidery needles and a clumsy painting, but the scene made me consider my fortune to live now, when women can often determine their own value, how they want to spend their time, whether or not they will marry. I am very far from accomplished in the traditional sense, and mercifully, I don’t need to be. Instead, I can enjoy these pastimes for what they are—diversions that give me a way to relax, to stop thinking about efficiency and optimization, productivity and worthiness, and to simply enjoy the satisfaction of making something uniquely mine. And should any of this change in the future, well, I suppose there’s always the piano.
-Tracy Lum
Tracy Lum is a writer and software engineer based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Bustle, Hello Giggles, Little Old Lady Comedy, and Thought Catalog. Twitter: @tracidini.