Labour of Love

When you put a tremendous amount of love into your work, as in any relationship, you can't know - you can only hope - that what you're offering will in some way be received. You shape your love to artistic demands, to the rigors of your genre. But still, it's a labor of love, and it's the nature of love that you must give it freely.
— Anne Michaels

A labor of love is exalted because it provides joy and self-expression to those who perform it.
— Dennis Kimbro

Patience; accomplish thy labor; accomplish thy work of affection!
Sorrow and silence are strong, and patient endurance is godlike.
Therefore accomplish thy labor of love, till the heart is made godlike,
Purified, strengthened, perfected, and rendered more worthy of heaven.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Earlier in the year, the daughter gave me a dress she’d bought for the granddaughter and requested I embellish it with some embroidery, the idea vaguely being that I’d have it done for Easter (which I’d done once before, a few years ago).

Okay. That’s fine. What kind of design did she want? Something old fashioned to go with the style of the dress. An ambiguous mention of wildflowers. All righty then.

I did periodic searches, came up with a few vague ideas, ordered a crap ton of embroidery transfers, none of which were quite right, and tried to pin the daughter down to something more precise because I didn’t want to mess up the dress by doing the wrong thing to it.

Embroidery is like getting a tattoo, it’s possible to remove it, but the surface it’s removed from is never quite the same.

So a couple of weeks ago I cornered the daughter and showed her a variety of old and new embroidery transfers. Most were rejected, but enough were acceptable that I could start to work. The clock was ticking.

One of the transfers she liked was really too big for what we wanted, but I was able to shrink it down with my printer, trace it onto tracing paper, and go over the lines with a transfer pencil. The problem with this was, the section was somewhat large and the transfer lines faded rapidly. So I worked from the edges inwards because the outer edges were more complicated and I didn’t need as strong a line at the center. Even so, this one section took me two and a half days of steady work.

Next I did the pocket, because it was on the opposite side of the dress. I figured if I only got these two sections done, the dress would still have a balanced look to it and no one but me would have to know it was supposed to have more.

This was especially tricky because the pocket was already attached to the dress. I was able to get the entire design into an embroidery hoop, and then I cut a piece of cardboard to fit inside the pocket to protect the dress from my needle. This was a really fiddly piece to do and took me another couple of days.

Then I came to the space below the pocket. We’d picked a few miscellaneous transfers for it, but when I laid them out they just didn’t have a flow to them. So I dug through my transfers again, found a cluster that looked good but was a little large, played around with the copier on my printer until I got them down to the right size, traced them onto tracing paper, and outlined the back with the transfer pencil. Then I found another cluster that fit with it and traced it as well, adding the flowers and butterflies after. There are six different transfers in total in this section, but I added them one at a time so as not to smudge the lines too much..

It only took about three extra late nights and a week of doing pretty much nothing else but sew, but I had it done by Saturday.

And here’s a picture of my granddaughter wearing it on Easter Sunday.

Truly, a labour of love.