The class was eight weeks, Tuesday evenings, in a studio above a fabric shop. There were six people in it, ranging from a woman in her seventies who had done embroidery her whole life and wanted to learn a specific new technique, to a college student who had seen embroidery on social media and was trying it out, to me. The teacher was patient and technical and did not romanticize what she was teaching. ‘This is a skill,’ she said on the first night. ‘Skills take repetition. You will do this badly before you do it well, and that is not a sign that you’re doing it wrong. That is the process.’
I did it badly at first. The tension was wrong, the angle was wrong, I kept losing the thread on the needle. By week four I was doing it adequately. By week eight I was doing it well, which in this context means: my stitches were consistent, the tension was even, the shapes I intended to make were the shapes that appeared on the fabric.
I kept doing it after the class ended. I bought thread and small pieces of practice fabric and worked on them in the evenings. I got better. I developed a preference for botanical subjects — plants, specifically, because I liked the combination of regularity and variation. Plants have a logic but they also grow within it, and that logic-plus-variation maps onto what hand embroidery does well: a consistent technique producing organic results.
By the time I started the wedding dress cuffs, I had been doing this for about seven years. The cuffs were the most ambitious thing I had attempted. They were also, unambiguously, the best thing I had done. Seven years of Tuesday evenings and weekend hours and practice pieces that didn’t go anywhere — all of that built the skill that made the cuffs possible.