I know that visible mending is a real philosophy and not just a craft technique. The object exists in time. It changes. The changes are part of it. You can try to hide the changes or you can work with them, make them deliberate, give them their own character. I had known this about textiles before. I know it now about relationships.
I know that making things with your hands is not a hobby. It is a different way of being in time. You can hold a thing you made and feel the hours in it, not as abstraction but as texture. That is not available to you in things you bought. It is not better, in some universal sense. It is different. And the difference matters when someone mistakes the object for something interchangeable with any other object of its kind.
## The Left Cuff
I want to end with the left cuff, the intact one, the one that was never cut.
It is as I made it: dense botanical embroidery in silk thread, the fern fronds layered over each other, the specific shading I worked out in August of the year I got engaged. Every stitch is where I put it. There is a small place near the inner wrist where the thread tension is slightly different — I can see it when I look closely, though I would challenge anyone else to find it — where I lost my focus briefly and had to restitch. That imperfection is also where I put it.